It is - as advertised - a long read, but Mark Blacklock's Guardian piece on the Samuel Smith Old Brewery pub empire really is as good as everyone has said online. That it was evidently carefully worded and meticulously researched is entirely understandable, given chairman Humphrey Smith's penchant for litigation.
Blacklock's article is a jaw-dropping tale of bizarre business practices, puritanical rules (no swearing, no digital devices), heavy-handed interventions in local planning issues and an extensive portfolio of properties that are perversely being allowed to fall into ruin.
On the one hand, I've always enjoyed Samuel Smith beers (especially the Organic Lager). Back in the day, one of their pubs near Old Street in London became a regular haunt on visits to London by virtue of permitting city-centre meet-ups that didn't break the bank, and I like the Waterguard in Cardiff, though haven't been in for a few years. It's also worth saying that there's sometimes something to be said for pubs without music, and the other rules - ridiculously draconian though they are - are not rigidly or uniformly enforced. (If they were, my phone-obsessed friend wouldn't have lasted more than two minutes in Ye Olde Murenger House in Newport last year.)
Yet the facts set out by Blacklock - especially the treatment of landlords and the apparent willingness to let historical building become derelict - are more than enough to make a boycott of the company's pubs seem like the only reasonable reaction.
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