Traditional East End pubs are disappearing as property developers around the Olympic Park tempt owners to sell up.
Nine out of 39 pubs in E3, around Bow, have been sold in the past 18 months to make way for flats.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
2012 Olympics are destroying East End pubs
Another good reason why we would have been better off without the Games:
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I don't think it's anything to do with the Olympics. Traditional South London pubs are closing rapidly as well, I can think of four recently boarded up pubs in the streets I cross to go from my house to the shopping centre, there are probably many more in streets I don't go down so often.
What is happening here is simple - you can get more income from a piece of land by building flats on it than you can from running a pub on it.
One liberal response to this - the natural response of those who claim that liberalism means uncritical acceptance of the free market, surely - is that people should be free to do what they like with land they own, and if they want to pull down the pub that's on it and build flats instead it's entirely up to them, and who is anyone else to stop them?
Are you suggesting the state should step in and tell people they have to run pubs on their land? Or it should buy the land and run the pubs itself if no-one else is willing to do so as they can't make a profit from it?
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