In the new series of Clarkson’s Farm, we see the eponymous hero diversify his interests from rearing pigs, planting crops and test-driving his latest Lamborghini tractor to the pursuit of buying a local pub in which he can sell his own farmed produce, and that from neighbouring farms.
It’s a noble cause, even though my suspicion is that Jeremy had another, equally ambitious purpose. As an enthusiastic and long-serving patron of licensed establishments, he probably always had in his mind the platonic ideal of the village boozer: no music, a bar billiards table, affordable food, local produce, a community hub.
“What would a village be without its village pub?” Clarkson asks, rhetorically. “It would just be a collection of houses.”
He’s right. There are a number of beautiful villages in the Cotswolds that you can drive through, all honey-coloured stone cottages and well-kept gardens, and it’s only after passing through them that you get the sense that something is missing from a scene of rural perfection. A centre of activity. A gathering place. A beating heart. A public house, by any other name.
Since the millennium, a quarter of Britain’s pubs have disappeared, at the rate of more than 600 a year. The pandemic, the rise in property taxes and national insurance, the difficulty in attracting staff to work antisocial hours and the pressures big breweries put on tenant landlords – plus the inescapable reality that running a pub is just bloody hard work – have all contributed to this decline.
Here in the Cotswolds, many of these once-thriving establishments stand fallow, the “For Sale” signs a grim testament to what has been lost from a community’s social life. Villages have indeed become just a collection of houses.
Clarkson’s search for a pub he can call his own is remarkable in that he had so many nearby to choose from. He has pictures of them all on a board in his office, rather like he is identifying suspects for a crime. I noticed a shot of my own defunct local, The Fox, which has now been closed for two years despite the determined efforts of a consortium of villagers to breathe new life into it.
I wish it had taken Clarkson’s fancy, but instead he opted for a bigger enterprise elsewhere in Oxfordshire and rechristened it The Farmer’s Dog. Despite its teething problems – a power failure on its first weekend – and the back-breaking and thankless labour required, he seems to be making a fist of it. What’s more, he is faithful to his idea of not selling anything that isn’t indigenous, hence you won’t find coffee or Coca-Cola on offer here.
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The menu declares that everything “is made entirely with ingredients produced on British farms”, with the trademark Clarksonian flourish that it’s “absolutely f**king delicious”. Farm to fork is the slogan he uses, and, in the show, he poses the question: “Can British farming save itself by saving the British pub?”
And here is the central proposition. Clarkson’s Farm is a significant piece of television, having brought to public attention the wide range of economic, social and indeed meteorological struggles faced by the British farming industry. He’s been on protest marches, attracted the interest of prime ministers and used his various media platforms to prosecute his case.
Can he do the same for the licensed trade? Industry estimates are that £1 in every £3 taken in pubs goes directly to the taxman, and clearly this is not an equitable situation.
Even as someone who doesn’t frequent pubs I understand the role they play in the country’s social fabric, and, while recognising that central government has many other more pressing problems, an initiative to give publicans – and, in fact, the hospitality industry as a whole – some support in the way of tax relief would be a tangible way to improve our quality of life.
I doubt that Jeremy Clarkson ever saw himself as a political figure, representing pressure groups and able to influence government policy. But it shows the power of both television and celebrity that he is able to agitate for change so effectively. And if he is able, through his own direct experience, to make the demise of the great British pub a cause célèbre, then more power to his elbow.
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