The Sheaf View

What this site is
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. For years now, pubs across Britain have been closing down at the rate of hundreds per year. 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. Is there a pub near you that you’ve wondered about but never been inside? Do you ever have an hour to pass in a strange town or city and find a pub looming up on your way? This blog is to inspire you, in some small way, to pop in and check them out and see what happens.

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. Because ordinary wonderful things happen in them.

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.

What this site isn’t
The things you’ll read at Get to the pub.com are not pub reviews. They’re blog posts. They’re about what happens when I go to the pub. If you want to, you can read them like reviews, and infer from them what might happen if you go to the pub. But in a way that’s a nonsense, because this site celebrates the lovely randomness of the pub, and this means no two visits to the pub are ever quite the same. Just read, enjoy, and get to the pub yourself. Whichever pub it is.

This site isn’t a beer blog. Beer tends to feature heavily in it, for fairly obvious reasons. I like beer quite a lot, so inevitably I write about it while I’m writing about pubs. But this isn’t a beer blog: it’s a pub blog that mentions beer. If you don’t like cask ale, or you don’t like beer at all, read it anyway. You’ll probably still like my writing.

This site isn’t a Sheffield blog. Much of its content quite naturally concerns pubs in Sheffield, because that’s where I live. But a fair chunk of it doesn’t. It doesn’t really matter whether you live in Sheffield or not. You’ll probably still like my writing.

Finally, this pub site also exists in opposition to rubbish pub sites. 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. So 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, and drive them down the search rankings.

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