The Fat Cat, pictured by Adam B (cc-by 2.0)

I didn’t know Dave Wickett but he changed my life.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice before on this blog, I lived in Birmingham before moving to Sheffield. I started visiting Sheffield regularly in the early 2000s; the more I did, the more I noticed that the pubs were exponentially better than the ones in Birmingham. And the more I noticed that, the less I wanted to go home. Eventually I could bear it no more, sold my house, and upped sticks to South Yorkshire.

OK, the pubs weren’t the only reason. The people were kinder; the city greener, prettier and easier-going; the pace of life a little gentler. But without the ‘Valley of Beer’ visit I made with a group of friends in 2002 – taking in miraculously good ale at places like the Fat Cat, Kelham Island Tavern, Gardener’s Rest and New Barrack Tavern – I would never have fallen in love with Sheffield the way I did.

Dave Wickett founded the Fat Cat in the early 1980s, an oasis of lovingly crafted cask beer at a time when tasteless keg stuff still dominated. People told him it couldn’t be done. He didn’t just prove them wrong: by making a success of the Fat Cat and the Kelham Island Brewery, he opened the way for Sheffield’s multitude of superb independent pubs and breweries. He kick-started the ale culture of the entire city.

I’d had a rough couple of years in the early noughties. Moving to Sheffield was the best thing I ever did. Surrounded by new friends, warm welcomes, inspiring scenery, and of course extraordinarily fine beer, I felt able to get my life together and make a fresh start.

Dave Wickett died last week at the age of 64. He clearly contributed much and will surely be missed by many. On a personal note I feel a need just to say: thanks for taking me to Sheffield, Dave.

See also
An obituary by Pete Brown
Tributes on the Sheffield Forum

Several decades ago the Brummie comedian Jasper Carrott had a gag about the sparse crowds attracted to Birmingham City Football Club. I was at the match the other week, and I turned round and said to the bloke standing next to me – and at this point Carrott would make a megaphone of his hands and bellow: OOOOOYY! This is what the Old House at Home was like.

There were a handful of other drinkers in there with us that afternoon, but none within a hundred yards. It was like a carpeted aircraft hangar. There was a sign at the bar setting out one of those absurd rules against wearing hats. There was a strained, austere feel, like a shop which you’ve realised is too expensive for you to buy anything but it’s deathly quiet and you’re the only customer so you have to look around for a few minutes just for show.

And there was a smell of roasting meat. For, although it was a Saturday, the Old House at Home was very much what I call a Sunday dinner pub. And it exemplified perhaps the biggest single problem common to Sunday dinner pubs: that they are simply too huge and cavernous to have any sort of atmosphere at all.

The Trawlerman, Cleethorpes. Note the attractive vignette of sliced roasted meat on the external wall

Suburban Birmingham specialises in these vast former coaching inns, but many places are similarly blighted. Stretched between the great pub cities of Sheffield, Derby and Manchester, you’d expect the Peak District to be blessed bountifully with great places for a pint and a natter. It’s not. There are good pubs out there. But it takes some research to hunt them out amid a surfeit of Sunday dinner pubs.

It isn’t just the size. Another factor is the bland decor. It’s not just ordinary, everyday blandness, the sort of blandness that you don’t notice. It’s a whole new level of bland. It’s assertively bland, aggressively bland, to the point of paradox. This is a blandness that doesn’t merely guide your thoughts towards the dull and banal. It forcefully insists that you abandon any notion of pleasure. It entirely forbids you to entertain, even silently, the existence of art, philosophy or the human soul.

On a trip down south a few months ago, I got along to the Fox on the Hill, in Denmark Hill, south London. I don’t know if a Wetherspoons can ever be quite sombre or restrained enough to qualify outright as a Sunday dinner pub, as the low prices will always attract folk wishing to attain merriment through a few pints. But the sheer size of the place hinted towards it. And the staff of both Wetherspoons pubs and Sunday dinner pubs typically seem to lack in training what they try and make up for in youthful enthusiasm. I asked if they had any pale ales on; the bar person pointed at the Abbot pump and said: “Um, this one’s quite pale?”

But the Fox on the Hill is just about spared the status of Sunday dinner pub by its layout. It’s a big pub but it houses a few smaller rooms around its central bar. The Sunday dinner pub layout is always much less interesting than this. The Sunday dinner pub is large, and it has bland decor, but it is also profoundly dull in terms of internal structure. The snugs, booths, and cosy corners cherished by pub cognoscenti are unknown here.

The next day, however, we hit Sunday dinner pub paydirt. We hit it at the Bunch of Cherries in St Albans. Boring beer; boring decor. Willing young staff; 20 minutes more to get my son’s dinner out after everyone else has got theirs. Zero ambience; zero chance of a random conversation about circuses, unemployment, beer dispense methods, local history or trombones. The Bunch of Cherries is the opposite of everything that a licensed premises is for. It is quite possibly the dullest pub I have ever visited.

Oh, and it has Cask Marque certification. So if you’ve ever thought this ‘independent’ award was meaningless – overseen, as it is, by such friends of the pubgoer as Punch Taverns and Carlsberg UK – then you were absolutely right.

Or were you? All the sickening figures about pub closures that we’ve pored over recently mask a significant fact. They are net figures: old pubs closed minus new pubs opened. And some of the new pubs opened (or reopened) have been great places like the Blake or the Euston Tap (you may have your own local favourite to add to this roll of honour). But the majority, I discovered with horror recently, are Sunday dinner pubs.

(I can’t remember where I read this. Someone blogged it, I think; possibly Phil Mellows. Do comment with a link if you can find one.)

Is a Sunday dinner pub better than no pub at all? Can a Sunday dinner pub ever be enjoyable, or is tolerable the best you can hope for? Are we hopelessly out of step with modern life? Those of us who love and understand pubs cite the successes of our favourite new boozers as a template for the renewal of watering holes the length and breadth of Great Britain. But was my dismal visit to the Old House at Home, all those years ago, a more realistic glimpse into the future? Because it’s no future I’d want a part of.

This week the news that Thornbridge is to take over the Bath Hotel has been received here in Sheffield with dismay. Not unanimous dismay. But enough to make you wonder whether the takeover will turn out to be a significant own goal.

Some commenters have pointed out the paucity of guest beers in existing Thornbridge pubs. Since the company took on the Hallamshire House last year, for instance, only its own beers have been available on draught. Choice of beer wasn’t the pub’s strongest suit beforehand, though. There’d be London Pride and something local like Five Rivers, which were good, and Doom Bar, which wasn’t.

But one of the reasons Sheffield drinkers appreciate the Bath Hotel is its wide-ranging and frequently rotated beer list. Will this be under threat when Thornbridge moves in? Not according to its brewer Matthew Clark, who has promised that “lots of different beers will be on offer too, not just ours and, fingers crossed, not the same stuff you get elsewhere”.

A second theme of the concerns raised this week is the regularity with which the company is now taking control of new pubs. “Thornbridge are risking doing a South Yorkshire version of Greene King,” commented one user of the Sheffield Forum. “Is it just me, or is Thornbridge taking over Sheffield?” came a tweet from the nearby Red Deer (possibly with an anxious eye on its own takings). Another worrier asked: “Is there any pub in Sheffield not being taken over by Thornbridge or the Forum?”

Well, yes: at least 400 of them. Thornbridge’s estate of pubs extends to about six. The ‘monopoly’ argument is mathematically rubbish. We’re a million miles away from a Greene King situation. We don’t know the company’s expansion plans, but even if these continue at the current rate it’ll be a while before it approaches the sort of power wielded by even a smaller regional brewer such as Robinsons around Stockport.

But the Thornbridge brand started to suffer in this city a few weeks ago when the name of A4e – a company with close family links to the brewery – was tainted by some unfortunate revelations when the government’s ‘workfare’ policy hit the buffers (see Curmudgeon for more). In Sheffield, arguably the least Conservative of England’s major cities, some pubgoers of my acquaintance were quick to start disparaging Kipling and Wild Swan as “Tory beer”.

And there’s a justifiable anxiety that the price of a pint in the Bath could rise by anything from 50 pence to a pound. The Bath is currently one of the cheaper places to enjoy a beer in Sheffield city centre. Thornbridge pubs are not obviously concerned with affordability.

But for me, the observation that’s bang on is that, while it’s been great when Thornbridge has taken over somewhere rotten or moribund, the company should stay the hell away from the Bath for the simple reason that it’s brilliant as it is.

The Hallamshire House, like the Bath, was already an admired pub when it passed into Thornbridge’s hands. It may be a little livelier now than it was then, having drawn away some of the student crowd from the Closed Shop across the road. But the refurb did away with an unusual and entirely beautiful stained glass ceiling. It also introduced a room full of Victorian family photos with no apparent connection to the pub or the community and ugly enough to paralyse a horse. Before, there was an organic, accidental feel about its homeliness. Now it feels planned, calculated and templated.

In short, I like it less now than I did before. I fear the same will be true of the Bath. And, if I worked for Thornbridge, I’d be afraid that the company might now be starting to alienate the very customers to whom it owes its successes so far.

See also
Wee Beefy’s blogpost on this subject