You’ve probably heard this. Maybe said it yourself, walking past another boarded-up local. The numbers are grim: 366 pubs closed permanently in England and Wales in 2025. More than one a day.
It’s been going on for years. Business rates. Changing habits. Everything costing more. You can drink a decent bottle of Burgundy at home for what a round costs in central London these days, and you don’t have to find your way home afterwards.
The economics of the traditional pub are brutal, and they’re not getting easier.
The big pub chains have struggled. Local institutions have been converted into flats or gastropubs that feel like hotel lobbies. The local pub that your dad might have visited on a Friday night is probably a Tesco Express now.
The British pub is finished. We know this.
Except.
Walk along Blackhorse Road in Walthamstow (I live nearby, so I do regularly enough) and you’ll find seven independent breweries within a mile of each other. Old industrial units, converted into taprooms for Exale, Signature Brewery, Pretty Decent and Renegade, among others. A winery and a brandy house have joined in too, because why not. On a Saturday afternoon it is, to put it mildly, not struggling for custom.
It’s not just E17. The UK now has close to 1,000 micropubs, and the number keeps growing. Independent pubs made up around two-thirds of all pub visits in 2024. Something is clearly going on.
These aren’t pubs trying to compete with the big chains on price or footprint. They haven’t found some clever way to make a pint cheaper than the supermarket. They’ve done something more interesting than that. They’ve worked out what they’re actually for.
Because here’s the thing: a micropub isn’t in the business of selling cheap alcohol. M&S does a better job of that, and so does your corner shop. The economics of competing on price with a supermarket don’t work, and any pub that tries is going to lose.
But a micropub is in the business of something a cold can from the fridge at home can’t give you. Somewhere to go. Something to belong to. A recommendation from someone who actually cares which beer you drink. A conversation that starts with a question about what you’re having and ends up somewhere unexpected. The kind of Saturday afternoon that is, in itself, the point.
The people turning up aren’t doing so instead of drinking at home. They do both. The micropub revival hasn’t happened because people suddenly decided supermarkets were bad. It’s happened because people have realised the two things simply aren’t in competition. They’re doing entirely different jobs.
And this, I think, maps neatly onto something we hear a lot about financial planning.
Why do you need a planner when you can invest online in four minutes? When your banking app tells you how much you spend on each thing? When your pension provider has a perfectly good app that tells you exactly where you stand?
Because a financial plan isn’t just a list of products, any more than a good Saturday afternoon is just about the alcohol.
There is, of course, quite a lot an app can do. There’s also quite a lot it can’t. Recognising when a question about the portfolio is really a question about something else entirely. Noticing when a decision is being driven by anxiety rather than logic, and knowing whether to say so. Remembering that two years ago you were certain about the plan, and that something has since shifted, and understanding why.
The pubs that are thriving aren’t the ones that got bigger or cheaper. They’re the ones that got clearer about what they were actually offering. And it turns out, that thing is worth quite a lot.
Cheers all.
