Viva Brighton Issue #73 March 2019

BITS AND PUBS
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PUB: THE GREAT EASTERN
I walk through the
narrow door from the
unseasonably springlike
Friday afternoon
sun into the rather
dimmer interior of
the Great Eastern. I
know it well: it’s one of
those pubs that I keep
finding myself at, year
after year. I normally
order a Bourbon, of
which they have a vast
range. But today I’m
on a mission. Today
I’m after a particular
type of beer.
There’s nowhere else quite like the Eastern.
It’s an independent kind of pub which
wears its scruffiness proudly on its sleeve; a
boozer with the sort of idiosyncratic charm
that has organically developed over years
and decades; a place you couldn’t replicate.
A pub for regulars: there’s a guy sat in the
corner who looks as much of a fixture as
the long bar, the book-lined shelves, or the
beer mat-plastered beams.
But it doesn’t look like we can count on it
for long, at least not in its present incarnation.
The clue is in the name of the beer
I’m ordering: Save the Eastern, a 3.8% ale,
retailing at a modest £3.75. The pub, you
see, is under threat.
The Great Eastern is owned by Ei, formerly
Enterprise Inns, the biggest pubco in
the country. But for over 20 years it’s been
leased out to Pleisure, a much smaller,
Photo by Lizzie Lower
independent, Brighton-based
company
that has been running
a handful of pubs, including
four Brighton
boozers.
In 2016, the managing
director of Pleisure,
Nick Griffin, made
a request for some
of the pubs he runs
to be ‘free of tie’. He
was trying to take
advantage of the Pubs
Code, a recent piece
of government legislation
designed to free tenants from the
obligation of purchasing their booze directly
from the major pubcos, in exchange for
a commercial, market-based rent.
Ei responded by promptly serving notice
on the lease of the Great Eastern, which
ends in March; Griffin has also been told
the St James Tavern and The Office, his
two other Brighton pubs, will not have
their leases renewed. The Pull and Pump
has already gone. A petition asking Ei to
change its mind has collected over 5,000
signatures.
I take my pint out to one of the little tables
in the cul-de-sac by the side of the pub,
and watch the Trafalgar-streetlife go by.
And I can report that it’s not a bad-tasting
ale. But can the campaign it’s named after
do what it says on the pump badge? Come
on Ei, have a heart.
Alex Leith
....17....