Mark Andrews: The Rover's Return wouldn't stand a chance in today's bland, corporate climate

The chances are you probably won't have been there, either. But its future should be of concern to us all.

The Old Chainyard is a smallish community pub in Roseville, a village on the edge of the Black Country. It is not atypical of the thousands of other small community pubs which are disappearing at an alarming rate. The latest data suggests that more than 50 pub close every month, well up on last year. And barring an intervention from planners, the Old Chainyard will soon be joining that list.

The landlady, who has run the pub for the past nine years, says she will be given three months' notice to quit the building if Dudley Council grants planning permission to turn the pub into a supermarket. As a private tenant who rents the premises from a pub company, only she truly knows how profitable or otherwise the Old Chainyard is. But in order to support its supermarket plans, the building's owner - Ipswich-based Red Oak Taverns - has commissioned some consultants to justify why the pub cannot possibly be viable. And their reports make for depressing reading.

My intiial reaction was to dismiss them out of hand. For a start, one of the reports had to be resubmitted after its author initially confused the Old Chainyard with a pub in Wiltshire.  A second, slightly more convincing report, by real-estate surveyors Savills, did manage to get the approximate location right. But it still put it in the wrong local authority area. Which is a bit unfortunate when you are asking the local authority for permission.

But while it is easy to scoff at this sloppiness, the real worry should be: what if their conclusions are actually right?

In a nutshell Savills says that the Old Chainyard cannot realistically be viable because of the type of pub it is: not part of a national chain; too small to be of interest to a national chain; focused primarily on high-quality ale rather than food; and is surrounded by larger, corporate chain pubs which benefit from greater economies of scale. 

In other words, there is no place in 21st-century Britain for the traditional community pub. 

Following this logic, for the Rover's Return to have any chance of survival in real life today, it would need to adopt an open-plan layout with corporate decor, replace Betty's hotpots with pre-prepared bangers and mash from a central supplier, and substitute Newton & Ridley's Best with some easy-maintenance keg beers bought at a bulk discount from a global brewing giant. I'm guessing Ken and Mike brawling in the snug would be a bit of a no-no, too.

You hate to think what Annie Walker would have made of it.

This model probably explains why Banks's cask mild is set to disappear from our pubs too. Why would the pub giants, who - according to Savills, control 30 per cent of pubs in England and Wales - want to bother with that, when nationally advertised keg beers and lagers are far cheaper, and easier to store? Come back Watney's Red Barrel, all is forgiven.

Still, on a positive note, the report does say that Heineken is investing £40 million into its pubs, reopening 62 of them. Cold, gassy lagers all round, then. 

Personally speaking, the sort of pub the Savills report sees as the future is the type of place I would avoid like anthrax. I truly hope this report proves to be hopelessly misguided, and that individually run, community locals that serve lovingly kept cask ales succeed in fighting off the bland, corporate chains.

But a lot of that is down to us. If you haven't visited your local community pub for a while, now is the time. Because if you don't give it the support it needs, it could well become the next target on the supermarket giants' list. And every time this happens, our lives become just that little bit duller and greyer.

And while you're about it, sign our petition to Save Banks's Mild change.org/p/save-our-banks-s-mild