Festival time at the pub that aims to have everything

If you dared to ask for a half rather than a pint he’d say “What’s up, dun’t tha like it?” In those days landlords didn’t have to try too hard; lots of people sweated away in hard manual jobs that required the glugging of beer after each shift. If you were young, it was one of the few places you could escape from your mam and dad. Until they came in later for the last hour.

Now pubs are struggling against a tide of cheap tinned beer, the smoking ban and a weird kind of accepted wisdom that the pub is no longer the place to be seen if you’re not an old bloke in a cap with a nose like Rudolph.

Surely if pubs were really successful cultural and social hubs, then we might not need arts centres or community centres or museums?

One pub in particular has taken these ideas on board. This weekend the Little Festival of Everything is happening at the Fauconberg Arms in Coxwold, North Yorkshire. “Everything” in this case includes theatre, music, poetry, storytelling, a story hunt, children’s events and, on the Saturday night, “a good old knees up!”.

Artists include the York-based singer-songwriter Sophie MacDonnell, puppeteers Tucked In and the Forward Theatre Project. The Sunday morning market will trade goods as well as stories and ideas. Saturday night’s concert, billed as “the later it gets, the rowdier it gets”, sounds good to me.

This is all part of a trend to reinvent pubs, or take them back to what they used to be, as centres of all aspects of local life. It’s being championed by The Pub is the Hub, set up 10 years ago to promote a diversity of uses, as well as different ways of running pubs, like the George and Dragon in Hudswell near Richmond which is owned and run by the community.

The organisation lists establishments like The Coach and Horses in Hemingby in Lincolnshire which has a well-appointed Youth Room where the young people of the village can go rather than hang around the bus stop and the phone box. Another offers free wi-fi and an internet café-style computer and printer, and a third has an onsite butchers.

Reading the list makes you think that you can do anything in a pub: of course I’m very keen that public libraries should stay open but I’ve noticed several pubs offer versions of libraries where old books can be borrowed. Pub theatre has been around for years, and in London you can see films in pubs.

In fact, you can play a game where you try and think of the most outlandish thing to put in a pub and then see if it’s been tried anywhere.

Hairdresser in a pub? It happened in Leicester in 2009 when a salon relocated after a fire. Voting booth in a pub? Go to the Mason’s Arms in Frome, Somerset, and cast your X. Philosophy in a pub, giving new resonance to that old line “I drink therefore I am” from that Monty Python song? Go to the Crown Hotel in Liverpool’s Lime Street for a night of heavy thinking.

Let’s hope the Small Festival of Everything is a big success. And one more thing: as a chap who doesn’t drink alcohol, I’d like to see a wider variety of soft drinks and coffees in pubs. That really would be a festival of everything!

The Fauconberg Arms: www.fauconbergarms.com, Pub is the Hub: www.pubisthehub.org.uk