Welcome to the 'The Lying Slut' .............. Britains Toughest Pub!

reply to post by studio500


Oh yes....it's better. But many problems linger. This is a very special place to those who have lived their lives here. No place like it anywhere. I do think poverty does play a role in this type of thing though....in the area you mentioned, and anywhere really. You know, it's a sad fact, but have you ever noticed that there are many more liquor/beer ads....lottery ads etc....in these araes? I have just seen that a lot. It's almost like it's on purpose....kick em while they're down so to speak.

reply to post by stumason

Pub culture is dying in the UK

Pub culture isn't simply dying off, it is being systematically and deliberately killed off.

Pubco's, who are by and large owned by the large brewing concerns, are screwing over tenants and leaseholders to such an extent that it's almost impossible to operate as a Landlord unless having the financial luxury and ability to buy freehold and run a Free House.

In addittion there has been a succession of restrictive legislation and taxation that has seriously handicapped the ability to trade at a profit.

I firmly believe that there has been a concerted effort to demonise British drinking culture with the specific purpose of shutting local and community pubs which have traditionally been the focal point of local communal life and the place where people met and discussed matters that directly affect them, thus seriously restricting the opportunity to discuss local and national issues and the conduct of our politicians and their backers etc.

Originally posted by Freeborn
I firmly believe that there has been a concerted effort to demonise British drinking culture with the specific purpose of shutting local and community pubs which have traditionally been the focal point of local communal life and the place where people met and discussed matters that directly affect them, thus seriously restricting the opportunity to discuss local and national issues and the conduct of our politicians and their backers etc.

I don't know much about the UK, but when I was younger I loved bars in other parts of the world, especially sleazy and dangerous dive bars. ( Yeah, I'm a real gent. ) In my 20s I considered myself a collector of bar experiences, the dirtier the better. I've mellowed with age, and I don't drink nor go bar-hopping hardly at all anymore, but I like knowing that kind of place is around, as an option. In addition to dangerous and sleazy things, some wonderful and even poetically spiritual things can happen in a dive bar.

Something about dive-bars/pubs intimidates a certain kind of person who perhaps feels awkward in a rough-and-tumble environment and can't roll with it. Bars/pubs have a very specific kind of culture and ethic, a very specific vibe, and it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Unfortunately a lot of the people who are rubbed the wrong way by divebar culture seem to end up as government regulators. People who can't leave well enough alone until everyone is as humorless, miserable, and churlish as they are.

reply to post by silent thunder


Got to agree with you there, I much prefer the old traditional local pubs, back street boozers and rough and ready type pubs which seemed to overflow with charcters and atmosphere above the new, sanitized chain owned pubs which lack any sort of heart, character and passion.

reply to post by Freeborn


What you say is true, but there are other contributing influences also. I think the death knell for the English pub came when they banned smoking inside them. Many people who drink also smoke, and being forced outside to have a cig especially when it is raining or other inclement weather puts a lot of people off.

Also the price of getting a drink in these places are becoming astronomical, the high tax and corporate pricing just makes it too expensive now for ordinary folks to have the cash to go to the pub, what used to be a more or less nightly excursion for the working man, to pop in and have a couple of jars is just to expensive. So now it is a few tins in the fridge which can be bought much cheaper down at the local supermarket.

As to the OP, Bolton, it is not a country pub it is a in the centre of a council estate in a run down and impoverished former mill town on the Northern side of Manchester and inner city council estates have always had rough pubs, if you think that place is bad, you should of visited the Ship on the Ordsall council estate, once saw 8 guys completely mashed up by a pikey with a coal hammer in there, that was trippy let me tell you.

The £100 of Cannabis is nothing, it is only about 10 grammes worth, considering the area and the prevalence of use nowadays I would say it is a very low find. And |Coke, well its taking over as the drug of choice in the UK recently, sadly, it is an aggressive drug I have seen people acting like such idiots on it, thinking they are invincible when they have taken it. Unlike the E crazy of the 90's which made people feel loved up and happy, which is why the 90's were perhaps a lot calmer, but the 80's were rough so were the 70's.

I have noticed over the years though that although overall the amount of violence has not risen that much, the type of violence and the intensity has increased dramatically. Back in the 70's and 80's there were still lots of fights outside pubs (sometimes inside too) but it tended to be 1 on 1 as opposed to the pack of animals you get jumping one person now and using a weapon was considered cowardly now it seems all the youths are carrying knives and weapons and will stab someone even when they are unconscious on the floor, before it was a fight and afterwards people shook hands and it was done, now it becomes like a blood feud.

I wonder how much media is responsible for this, I see a direct correlation with the increase of violence on TV to the way the viciousness has increased

reply to post by Freeborn


In a pub in Middlesborough with a uni mate from Nottingham. I honestly can't remember why we were there but i digress......

He wasn't the sort that should really be in any rough place - he was very funny but very posh and loud and almost had "victim" written over him for some places....

Anyhow, i had to rescue from 2 women in this pub. Sticks out for me because one of the women had love and hat tattooed on her fingers 0 i say hat because she had a finger missing! (good to see that didn't stop her love of tattoos!).

I agree with you though, plenty of places like this in the North UK. Used to live near a NF pub in Bradford. First time i ever went there, as i was arriving an asian taxi driver was being thrown out of the (closed) window followed by the words "don't ever f*****g beep your horn here again you c***, you sit there and wait like a good P***" - one of those lovely moments in life where you are left thinking you have been seen so you can't really turn round now.....

Originally posted by studio500
The title suggests that this may be Britains toughest Pub but I somehow think that there may well be hundreds or even thousands of similar Pubs across the UK like this one.

I'd agree that you're probably right. While there aren't that many pubs where I am where this kind of thing wouldn't happen, I don't live in an area with that much poverty. I do live on a council estate, but nowhere near as bad as some of these housing estates.

It's pretty interesting when you see TV shows like Shameless. That is genuinely how a lot of people in the UK live. It seems ridiculous and extreme, but just like there are a lot of "trailer trash" in the US, there are a lot of chav scum in the UK.

That's where, I believe, we end up with massive social problems like those seen in this piece.

There are a few solutions to it though...

1. Shut down the off-licenses selling booze to kids. Prosecute them (I suspect there is a LOT of corruption with cops going on there!)
2. Fix the price of alcohol as the gov is suggesting, meaning supermarkets can't sell a 2L bottle of Cider for £1.
3. Instead of spending the tax revenues on the "nicer side of town" (all local authorities do this because it's where THEY live!) they should have a drug/alcohol treatment program and social schemes to get the community involved.
4. Areas like this should be demolished, razed to the ground and rebuilt. Modern housing is affordable to build when it's the community doing it - I believe there are schemes like that in the USA and other European countries, but we don't have that here.

Ultimately it comes down to the environment around a person. If you live in a nice place you want to keep it that way. A lot of people in the UK do not live in a nice area, they see the drug and alcohol problems, the dereliction, the peeling paint and the urban decay, and there is a complete lack of opportunity to change it. There are only a few people within a community with the energy to do anything about it, and they receive next to no help from their local government.

Unfortunately, I don't think any of this is going to change until we have a war. People have no pride, no self respect, no moral compass. If we were fighting a common enemy the community spirit would surge and these people who have no goals and no ambitions would have something to fight, instead of each other.

Interestingly, I think the war we might see will be internal. Imagine what these places are like now, and then consider the austerity we're going to see in the future. Can you imagine what these places are going to look like next year, or the year after, when taxes are even higher and the unemployment even greater? Many of those living in these communities will leave to find a way to survive elsewhere, meaning the problems will likely spread.

For the last four years I've been expecting that there will be massive social unrest, and the riots last year were just the start of that. This is the kind of community those people come from. And this is what we're going to see more of as the economy continues to tank.

Interesting thread, I'll have to keep track of this one and come back later

At my old local i once saw the landlady run outside to headbutt a Police Office whilst screaming "how dare you arrest my regulars?"

I don't know who was more shocked, the Police or the guy she was trying to save! But, yes, these places exist in probably every town in the UK. I would wager that some parts of South Wales, in the valleys, where there has been high unemployment for decades, are far worse than anything shown in the MSM.

Yes we've always had the pleasure of these places, every estate had one and they all eventually go the way of destruction.
The one on the end of my street suffered much the same fate, oh my god, about 26 years ago. Shame as it was a huge, lovely building. The rep just went down and down, the police went in more and more, and it met it's inevitable end via a roof riot.
After knocking many a bobbies hat off with flying tiles, said rioters were eventually coaxed down when the night turned chilly and they'd run out of fags. It was torched to the ground probably within the few hours after that and is now a block of CCTV covered flats.

reply to post by Suspiria


My favourite bit concerning The Lying Slut was the demonstraters standing outside chanting save our pub.......whilst setting fire to it!

Genius....you couldn't make it up sometimes.

Originally posted by Freeborn
reply to post by silent thunder

 

Got to agree with you there, I much prefer the old traditional local pubs, back street boozers and rough and ready type pubs which seemed to overflow with charcters and atmosphere above the new, sanitized chain owned pubs which lack any sort of heart, character and passion.

Absolutely agree.
We used to have several great pubs in my town, now we have one that I would consider going to. There are others outside of town, but nowhere near what it used to be.

My favorite pub is a rock pub in another town a few miles away, I don't get there too often, but it is a true pub, where people know each other, where you can have some real banter with the staff.

I go up to Leicester once a year for Donington festival, and one of the best parts about that is going to the pubs in the nearby Donington village, packed with rockers and punks for those few days a year.

One of the biggest problems I think we have is that the youth culture is focused on a few areas. If you go to Oxford or Cambridge there are hundreds of great little pubs that do fantastically well, because they have the youthful energy to keep them going. They are perhaps the last places in the UK where genuine varied night-life still exists.

If only we could make every town in the UK a Uni-town.

I saw a great story a few years ago where a village community lost their pub. It went out of business and shut down. But the people there formed a company together and reopened it as a community pub. They now operate it and run it themselves as profitable business. Because the money is staying in the community and not going to a corporation people are willing to support it and will deliberately choose it over other popular venues.

That's the secret, local economy. Always has been and always will be. But our government and local authorities have blindly supported the massive corporations over everything else, and the money is consistently funneled out of communities.

If only people spending their money at a bar considered where their money was actually going we would see a change.

Originally posted by Flavian
reply to post by Suspiria

 

My favourite bit concerning The Lying Slut was the demonstraters standing outside chanting save our pub.......whilst setting fire to it!

Genius....you couldn't make it up sometimes.

Thread suddenly makes me want to listen to Macc Lads, My Pub!
Friend of mine managed to turn one of these pubs around that's on the edge of town. Was infested with your common garden variety of dickhead and spent much of it's life with shutters on. He barred the lot of them and installed his own friendlier variety of dickhead, no shutters required.

I did say he was a friend didn't I?

Why do they need to shut it down? In my opinion, keeping all the chaos, mayhem, and murder confined to one bar is a boon for the police force and the community. If the owner of the bar doesn't like it, they can close it down. If the bartenders don't like it, they can work somewhere else. If they emergency services find it too dangerous to respond to calls, then don't respond to calls there. Let each person frequent this establishment at their own risk. Let the riff-raff sort themselves out. Who cares if they are drinking an hour past the cutoff time? Just about any bar in the country will lock the doors, throw out the amateurs, and then keep drinking for a couple hours after closing time. Just about any bar in the country will have coc aine use in the bathrooms.

I say let them have their little hell hole, and if the trouble spills out away from there deal with it on a case by case basis. Much easier to deal with them after they leave the bar than it is to deal with them inside the bar.

This is a classic example of taking a very minor problem and aggravating it into a big problem. They turned an offense of drinking past curfew into something much more dangerous in arson and theft!

reply to post by PrinceDreamer


You are right, the smoking ban hasn't helped.
The common sense thing to do would have been to allow a smoking room inside pubs providing certain ventillation criteria were met - but of course it's all part of the programme to force us out of pubs and thus limit the time we interact with each other and discuss things like governments and politicians.

The breweries haven't complained about the unjust and astronomical increase in the price of draught beers and lagers etc as they still get their profit regardless of where their alcohol is bought - in fact it is cheaper and far more economical to produce and sell bottled and canned ale than it is draught.

And yes, coke has become the drug of choice for so many over the last 5 - 10 years.
As with all things of this nature there tends to be a lot of rubbish spoken about it - but it can definately cause some people to be more 'aggressive' than usual.
Also traditional allegiances and values have broken down as so many people try to make money out of selling coke.
Unfortunately T&C prevent us from having a frank, open and adult discussion on the subject.

I have ran my own pubs and still go to pubs anything up to four or five times a week - I am getting old now and can't hack it like I used to!
In addition I have ran and worked doors in pubs and clubs on and off for far too many years to mention.
In my opinion violence certainly isn't more common place - it was far more frequent in the 80's and 90's - but it's the intensity, the number of people who are willing to act in a violent manner and the complete lack of respect and values that alarms me.
I feel the reasons for this are many and varied with several social and political explanations and root causes.

reply to post by Flavian


Oh yes, there's some rough houses in Boro and Teesside in general.

I go there quite frequently and have lots of mates through there, thankfully.

reply to post by detachedindividual


You make some interesting and valid points.

But there's no way any profits gained by increasing off licensed alcohol prices will be re-invested in social and community programmes of any kind.
Every one of Cameron's policies suggest he is intent on driving a greater wedge between the have's and have not's as he tries to take this country back to a Victorian like society.
He care's little about urban deprevation and the complete breakdown of traditional community values and social interaction.

And neither did his predecessors.

reply to post by getreadyalready




Unfortunately the common sense approach is not so common.

And there are far too many political agenda's at play and interfering, overtly moralistic, politically correct do-gooders.

reply to post by Freeborn


I have to say I think we are pretty much in agreement on this topic. I don't really go to pubs any more, Like you getting older, will be the 50 this year. I had started going less, just whittled it down to going to the pub to watch the footie with a few mates and enjoy the atmosphere and banter, the smoking ban killed that for me.

Your right about killing the cohesion within the local communities, they killed raves for the same reason, can't have a council scrote and a Dr. side by side talking bollocks and actually not being divided and getting to know each other. It is a shame we can't have a decent discussion about it but you are right T&C's prevent this

Originally posted by Freeborn

I firmly believe that there has been a concerted effort to demonise British drinking culture with the specific purpose of shutting local and community pubs which have traditionally been the focal point of local communal life and the place where people met and discussed matters that directly affect them, thus seriously restricting the opportunity to discuss local and national issues and the conduct of our politicians and their backers etc.

The mind boggles as to what 'local and national issues' are discussed at 'The Lying Slut'. Maybe they compare the policies of the various political parties, the state of the derivatives market and the latest parliamentary debates

Originally posted by PrinceDreamer
the smoking ban killed that for me.

Your loss is my gain. It's lovely to be able to go out and not be forced to breathe in the toxic fumes of others - not to mention ones clothes smelling like a used ashtray the day after.

reply to post by starchild10


I have had some of the most interesting conversations in such establishments.......normally at daft o'clock after being there for quite some considerable length of time....and with some of the most unlikeliest characters you would ever expect to enter into such conversations.

Originally posted by starchild10

Originally posted by Freeborn

I firmly believe that there has been a concerted effort to demonise British drinking culture with the specific purpose of shutting local and community pubs which have traditionally been the focal point of local communal life and the place where people met and discussed matters that directly affect them, thus seriously restricting the opportunity to discuss local and national issues and the conduct of our politicians and their backers etc.

The mind boggles as to what 'local and national issues' are discussed at 'The Lying Slut'. Maybe they compare the policies of the various political parties, the state of the derivatives market and the latest parliamentary debates

edit on 17-4-2012 by starchild10 because: (no reason given)