An interesting article in the local rag today regarding a "pub crawl" the local Camra branch did around closed pubs, to highlight the plight of the industry.

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Calli...ail/story.html

It's probably more interesting to those of you who know the suburbs of Bristol (none of the ones mentioned were central), but I'm sure there are countless similar stories elsewhere.

From a personal perspective, whilst it's always sad to hear of any pub closing, I can't honestly say I'm going to miss many of these. They were mostly in very run down areas of Bristol, and I'm sure in many cases had rather unsavoury reputations. Whilst I like to consider myself as something of an expert on Bristol pubs, and have been in the majority at some point (ie; more than half - it's a big place!), I think I'd only ever been in one or two of the ones in the article, and that was only once, many years ago.

The exception is probably the four that he mentions in his opening paragraph, but didn't actually tour around. These are not in such run down areas, and I've probably done three of those at one time. I don't know what the answer to the problem is, but I guess any publicity highlighting the problem can't do any harm.