Get to the pub.com

One day I went to a pub called the Sheaf View and sat on my own reading a book and drinking pints. For reasons I have still not fully ascertained, it was the happiest two hours of my entire life.

My name is Pete Green and I love pubs. Something like 50 pubs a week are closing down in Britain and this makes me sad. So while this blog chronicles some of my visits to pubs, its Grand Purpose is to encourage you to get to the pub, and to value and cherish it. If there’s a pub near you that you’ve wondered about but never been inside, or if you’ve ever got an hour to pass in a strange town or city and a pub looms up on your way, I want this blog to inspire you in some small way to pop in and check it out.

Why? Because the pub is a gloriously rich aspect of British culture, open to people of all classes and backgrounds, and every pub is unique and fascinating in its own way. The pubs closing down might not all be as nice as the ones featured in this blog tend to be, but they’re all somebody’s local; they’re all loved by someone. They’re all brimming with history. Their very walls echo with a million stories of infinitesimal human drama from lives like yours and mine. Let’s not just shrug and watch them slip away.

Also: you know when you search on the web for the name of a pub, and then you click dutifully on the first ten links that the search engine turns up, and there turns out to be nothing on any of those pages apart from the name and address of the pub and a box saying “Post a review of this pub”? This is because lots of people have thought they can make money by building websites about pubs, but the sites just consist of empty, traffic-pulling placeholder pages, which the site developer has never got round to adding content to. Another aim of Get to the pub.com is to provide an alternative to these sites, which are nothing more than a waste of your time.

I live in Sheffield so, notwithstanding my wanderings, a lot of the entries will be about pubs in Sheffield. I also like real ale, so I will talk about that a bit, but I don’t have a beard or listen to blues, so please don’t go reaching for daft stereotypes (I do play music though, so if you like my writing, have a listen to my songs too!) and please don’t assume that you won’t enjoy this blog if you drink lager.

This blog was originally called The Longest Crawl, before I realised that I’d accidentally nicked that title from this book by Ian Marchant. I haven’t read it yet but I must have seen the title somewhere and internalised it, then raked it back up, and was stupid enough to apply it to this blog without Googling it to make sure nobody had used it for something else already. (By the by, I have read Marchant’s Parallel Lines and it’s bloody fantastic!) So if you’ve subscribed to this blog under the old name, please update your feed reader thing to point to gettothepub.com.

Thanks for reading. I believe it’s your round.