“And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.”
—”The Secret People”
G.K. Chesterton

In 1136, Bishop Henri de Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror, founded the hospice of St. Cross, in Hampshire, to provide for “thirteen poor men, feeble and so reduced in strength that they can hardly or with difficulty support themselves without another’s aid.” It is the oldest almshouse in England. Its charter requires it not just to provide shelter and sustenance to its residents, but to offer food and drink, at least, to such poor wanderers as might call and ask for it. This “wayfarer’s dole,” as it is known, is made up of two traditional elements: a portion of bread and a horn of ale. For “good ale,” wrote George Borrow, who spent much of his own life wandering the roads of England many centuries later, is “the true and proper drink of Englishmen. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale, that is good ale.”

Ales and beers continue to be a source of refreshment and a focus of sociability for the English, of course. But the 12th-century brethren of St. Cross would not recognize many of the brews of today as beers at all, and the 19th-century taste of George Borrow would have found all too few of them “good.” For the traditional beers of England, symbols of the individuality of a small nation and the diversity of the regions it contains, are rapidly being lost. Ten ancient regional brewers have closed in the last year. Names and tastes, familiar in our mouths as household words —Marstons and Wards, Morland of Oxfordshire, Morrells and Mitchell’s, and Vaux—will no longer in their flowing cups be freshly remembered. Most of them were businesses that have been handed from generation to generation of the same family: Mitchell’s, of Lancaster, was founded by the great-great-grandfather of one of the company’s last directors. The brewery in which they operated, and which has now closed, had been founded much earlier—by monks, in the early 16th century. Morrells had been founded in 1782. A living tradition which connects us to our earliest civilized ancestors is running down the drains of cities and county towns across the country.

There are two reasons for this. Neither offers any consolation to anyone who values what is good from the past. First, there is the matter of changing taste. “Taste,” perhaps, is a misleading word in this context, as many people seem to be choosing their tipple not according to its effect on the palate or its ability to restore and refresh, but according to how good they feel when people see them drinking it. Hence the graceless, unhygienic, and impractical fad of serving and consuming bottled beers without a glass: The drinker can wave the label at his admirers. To say that there has been a change in “preference” might be a better description of what has happened, but even that would be inaccurate, because it suggests that consumers are exercising free will in their choice of what to drink. The truth is that the only choice that many are making is to conform to what they can be persuaded is fashionable. In an age of cultural drift, such loyalty to brands and styles offers some sense of belonging, perhaps. But such brands and styles don’t become fashionable by chance. As with so much that is marketed in our consumo ergo sum society, desire is orchestrated by remote rich and powerful interests through advertising campaigns in which a media-molded generation places such uncritical confidence.

Hence the displacement of the “nutbrown ales,” whose praises were sung by Chaucer, Chesterton, Shakespeare, and even the puritan Milton, by the characterless, blond, bland, bubble-bound brews that trickle lifelessly down the throats of today’s glassy-eyed gas-guzzlers who wouldn’t recognize real ale if they were upended in a vat of it. In each of the last five years, consumption of traditionally brewed beer has fallen by five percent. And what is drunk in its place? Lifeless decoctions whose qualities change little as they pass through the human digestive system. Pasteurized beers that are cheaply and easily produced, and dispensed under artificial gas pressure from the aluminum kegs that have long since replaced the handmade staved and hooped wooden barrels of tradition. It is almost impossible to describe the qualities of many of these, the most widely consumed beers in Britain today: They haven’t got any. Whether kegged, canned, or bottled, they are directed to be served “well chilled,” a practice which would obliterate any flavors if they had any, and which makes irrelevant the fact that they haven’t. These chemically colored, heavily carbonated concoctions are uniformly wet, whilst containing varying proportions of alcohol. Beyond that, there is little that can be said of them. Except, of course, that from the manufacturer’s point of view, they have one enormous advantage: They cost very little to make.

Which brings us to the second reason for this decline. Most brewing in Britain is in the hands of four companies which have greedily bought up countless smaller, local operators over the years, so that between them they now control most of the market. Increasingly remote from their employees and their customers, their sole motive is profit. Real ales are not only more costly to make than their sterile modern counterparts, but more costly to keep, too. As living, organic products, they must be transported with care, and allowed to settle in their barrels, which must then be skillfully tapped, racked, and tilted before serving the first pint, and carefully tended until serving the last. New-style beers require no such attention. They are manufactured, packaged, delivered, plugged in, turned on, and poured out. There is little room for human error; indeed, there is little that is human about any part of the procedure at all. The big four still make a few real ales but have long since stopped promoting them, and have thus effectively engineered their decline at a national level.

And yet . . . All is not lost. Young’s, the old family firm whose traditional brewery is at the Sign of the Ram in Wandsworth, London, has never compromised on quality, and has just announced that its profits have increased by 31 percent. Indeed, so traditional is this company’s orientation that it still makes its local deliveries in “drays,” wagons drawn by magnificent shire horses whose stables it has never closed. This is not a “heritage” publicity stunt, but an example of harnessed practicality: London traffic is so slow-moving that lorries waste vast quantities of fuel crawling and stopping through its tangle of tailbacks. Going faster than a horse-drawn vehicle is not possible, and a horse waiting to move is not wasting any energy. And Young’s is not the only brewery to be doing well by standing by its traditions. Fullers, Belhaven, Gale’s, Arkell’s, and Shepherd Neame are flourishing, too. Moreover, a rash of small-scale “micro-breweries” has sprung up in recent years, many making marvelous beers, prompted by earlier fears that the big boys would obliterate real brewing in Britain altogether.

The political point to be made here is that all can benefit when an enterprise is on a scale that allows it to be in harmony with the human condition. The breweries I praise are very much part of the localities in which they have grown up. Some of them might export bottles of their beers further afield, but the bulk of their business is conducted on their own doorsteps, and they live alongside the majority of their customers and all of the people they employ. The “big four,” by contrast, are amorphous agglomerations of anonymous financial power, making decisions that affect people’s lives from afar. You don’t have to be a distributist to realize that such remotely located money power is only going to be interested in local communities insofar as they serve its purpose.

Sadly, the mark of die distant boardroom on local life has been made even more cruelly on the places that serve our ales than on the beers themselves. There are 62,000 pubs in Britain; a recent survey showed that only 212 of them have so far escaped the decorative evisceration that would, if the big boys had their way, be the fate of them all. Most chain-owned English pubs (and most are chain-owned) are now no more distinguishable from each other than are internationally owned hotels or hamburger joints. City hostelries have been particularly badly hit. With no respect for any individual architectural integrity, their interiors have been ruthlessly replaced by the off-the-shelf, branded and themed cod-Irish, mock-Victorian, or pseudo-Australian kitsch that the marketing men tell the ad men to tell the customers they want, lens of thousands of individually interesting interiors have suffered like this, most of them irreparably. There are even examples of genuine Tudor ceiling beams in genuinely ancient pubs being ripped out to be replaced by plastic replicas more in keeping with the Tudor-bethan theme parkery that the marketing men dictate.

These sharp-suited carpetbaggers are no respecters of the names of the community resources that they so enthusiastically violate, either. Ancient inn signs that have immemorially announced that yon have found “The King’s Head” or “The White Horse,” names that have been on local maps since they were first drawn, have been ripped down and replaced by cheap, jokey, crudely coined inventions such as the “Slug & Lettuce” or “The Ferret & Firkin.” Such names don’t last, of course. One takeover later, and they’ll be equally inappropriately called “Paddy’s Bar” or “The Moon & Sixpence” before being once more stripped out and reincarnated as “The Brendan O’Grady” or “The Bruce & Sheila.”

All this is as disorienting to travelers trying to make their way through contemporary England as it is to wayfarers coping with contemporary English life. For too long and in too many ways have too many of us been separated from the inheritance of a past that gives meaning to our present. I saw this for myself recently when I revisited my parental home in Wimbledon. I had arranged to meet an old friend, but had mistimed my journey and arrived an hour early. It was a balmy summer’s evening, and I decided to pass the time by visiting die half-dozen or so local pubs that I had last used, perhaps too frequently, nearly 10 years earlier. I reckoned that by drinking a half-pint in one, and a soft drink in the next, I could take a look in each and return to meet my friend without compromising either courtesy or sobriety.

It was a sad little tour. The shabby Edwardian dignity of the interior of “The Dog & Fox” had gone, its slightly self-important plushness replaced by minimalist wine-cellar gothic—lots of black, loose box seating, sanded floors, a blackboard menu, and an iconostatic Australian flag hanging above the counter. Relentless Muzak competed with the shouted orders for fashionable foreign lagers in an unforgivingly hollow acoustic. I drank up and left. “The King of Denmark” was only slightly more recognizable. The traditional arrangement of lounge bar (carpeted for the clean and the suited) and public bar (linoed for the work-soiled and booted) had gone, as had the quaint little taproom for off-sales. England is a one-class, one-bar society now. Again, there was Muzak, and the blackboard, and the international lagers—but at one end of the great long omnibar I was reminded of the past by the sight and sound of three middle-aged men loudly boring each other and those within earshot in precisely the way that their predecessors might have done in the same spot three decades ago, even if the décor had then been different. The only pub that hadn’t changed at all was “The Swan”—and that, alas, only because it had been the first to have its guts ripped out before being wine-barified like the rest. It was just as horrible as I remembered it.

I saved “The Rose and Grown” until last. It had always been my favorite. Many were the times I had popped in for a pint, and fallen into conversation with whoever was serving or standing at the bar, in the easy community that was the English pub of old. Apart from there now being no division between the lounge and public bars, the decor was just as I remembered, and the beer just as good. There was no chance of casual sociability, though. I’he bar staff were too busy, and there was no elbowroom at the counter. I had to shout my order over the noise not of canned music but of countless competing conversations. There were more people in that pub than in all the rest I had visited put together. They had obviously not been listening when the voices of big business had been telling them what sort of beer, or pubs, they should want.