Opening the doors on my local

Tags: Pubs

The pubs ecosystem during COVID

Every pub sits amid a web of connections. Every new government Covid-19 edict that restricts the actions of the cask beer drinking public sends vibrations down the silvery threads of that web. I checked in on how my own local pubs in Leicester and Leicestershire are coping with lockdown and how they are planning for the future.

Laura Hadland

Laura Hadland was the CAMRACampaigner of the Year 2024. She is a beer writer, with regular features in The Telegraph, Ferment and a monthly What's Brewing column. Find out more about her work here.

Fixed costs
Substantial meals?
Market savvy
Looking forward

Photo of the pub garden at The Black Horse, Aylestone; ©2020, Laura Hadland Photography

I write from deep within the undergrowth, as it were. A thick jungle of limitations, legal restrictions and bans feels heavy upon me even though I am just an observer. It is January 2021 and pubs in all corners of the UK are closed. We are experiencing the third national lockdown and more than 100,000 people have died from Coronavirus. Most in the trade don’t expect to reopen until Easter, or May, or even later still in the year.

When surveyed in late December 2020 “almost 1 in 5 hospitality businesses (19%) had ‘low confidence’ that their business would survive the next 3 months.” [1] The Financial Times reported that 80% of UK pubs face a ‘perilous position.’ [2] These pubs are unique flowers. Their size, facilities, location and team means they all face a very individual journey in the current climate.

The Prime Minister told the public to avoid pubs, bars and restaurants on 16 March 2020 and then formally ordered them closed except for takeaway and delivery on 20th March. The Black Horse [3] in Aylestone, a cosy community pub, saw just three customers in the whole day before they were formally closed, when they would normally expect 50 punters at any one time in the evening.

Growing fears about the pandemic also took their toll on levels of custom in the smart, high-quality food led pubs run by the Beautiful Pubs Collective [4] in Leicester. “Over 50% of our bookings were cancelled or postponed and our daily income started reducing rapidly” owner Sam Hagger recalls. “On 15th March we made the difficult decision to start closing our pubs prior to the government’s forced closure as our wage costs were higher than our income. We temporarily laid off over 80 people one day before furlough was announced, a day which I refer to as the darkest in my career.”