Let's go down to the pub and have a jar

The New York Times has an article by Henry Shukman about a splendid British thing, the pub:

Strange things have been happening to England. Still reeling from the dissolution of the empire in the years following World War II, now the English find they are not even British. As the cherished “United Kingdom” breaks into its constituent parts, Scots are clearly Scottish and the Welsh, Welsh. But who exactly are the English? What’s left of them, with everything but the southern half of their island taken away?
Going back in time to trace roots doesn’t help. First came the Celts, then the Romans, then Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes. Invasion after invasion, until the Norman Conquest. English national identity only seemed to find its feet later, on the shifting sands of expansionism, from Elizabethan times onwards. The empire seemed to seal it. But now there’s just England, half of a green island in the northern seas, lashed by rain, scarred by two centuries of vicious industrialization fallen into dereliction, ruined, as D. H. Lawrence thought, by “the tragedy of ugliness,” its abominable architecture.
Of all English institutions, the one to count on would surely be the pub. Shelter to Chaucer’s pilgrims, home to Falstaff and Hal, throne of felicity to Dr. Johnson, the pub— that smoky, yeasty den of jollity— is the womb of Englishness, if anywhere is. Yet in the midst of this national identity crisis, the pub, the mainstay of English life, a staff driven down into the sump of history, old as the Saxons, is suddenly dying and evolving at equal rates. Closing at something like a rate of more than three a day, pubs have become scarce enough that, for the first time since the Domesday Book, more than half the villages in England no longer have one. It’s a rare pub that still thrives, or even limps on, by being what it was meant to be: a drinking establishment. The old idea of a pub as a place for a “session", a lengthy, restful, increasingly tipsy evening of swigging, is all but defunct.
To take a measure of the current state of the traditional English pub— or whatever is left of it— I decided this spring to revisit a corner of the northeast Cotswolds where I misspent my youth, an area littered with picturesque towns and villages, and studded— as I remembered it— with lovely pubs. What, I wondered, has happened to them?
Chipping Norton, about twenty miles northwest of Oxford, is a classic Cotswold market town, faced in gorgeous stone, its market square tilted down the side of a hill, with, in the bottom of the dale it overlooks, a splendid old wool mill famous for its massively tall chimney. The town’s liveliest and best-known pub is the Chequers, a chain of small rooms dense with conviviality.
But the pub I’m here for is one that ought to be a dying breed. Just up the hill from the main square is the Red Lion. It’s a real old market-town pub: just one small main room, and one old geezer on a bench (the night I visited) sipping slowly on pint after pint, a fire gently hissing away, and a lively and lissome barmaid joking with a couple of young men at the bar. And nothing on offer but drink. (At lunchtime you might be lucky enough to get a cheese roll.) This is a pub that has made no compromise with the times. The brown linoleum floor, the mix of tables, the darts board, the Aunt Sally at the back (a peculiarly delightful game played only in Oxfordshire and three neighboring shires, involving wooden battens, a clay pot and a lot of tipsy near-misses)— this place can hardly have changed since the ’70s, or even the ’50s. The creed might be: If the beer’s kept well, the pub is delivering itself of its chief charge.
This one limps on, surviving on big turnouts on market days in the town square just 50 yards away, and on the fact that it’s one of four dozen pubs owned by Hook Norton Brewery. I suppose the brewery can afford the odd sleeper.
The little neighboring town of Hook Norton sheds its light all over this region. It is famous because its beer is famous. A small independent brewery has somehow not just survived but grown; it is an extraordinary Tudor-style tower six stories high, built in the 1880s on the edge of town, still powered primarily by a magnificent steam engine on the ground floor.
Hook Norton is my own favorite ale. There are two mainstay brews, Hooky and Old Hooky, the second stronger than the first, and a rotating array of seasonal brews. Both have that magical hazel clarity, a dark gold color, that is the very hallmark of the English countryside, and both have the same marvelous taste that I never seem to find in any other beer.

Rico says there's a lot more; click the post title to go read it.