People sometimes ask why I started Pubs Worth the Walk.
On the surface, the answer is straightforward enough: I enjoy walking, I enjoy old pubs, and over the years I’ve discovered that combining the two is one of the great pleasures of living in Britain.
But the longer I work on the project, the more I realise it was never really about walking routes or pub reviews at all.
It was about something I noticed was disappearing.
Over the years, I’ve watched pubs quietly close across towns, villages and countryside communities throughout the UK. Some disappear suddenly behind boarded windows. Others fade more slowly — fewer regulars, shorter opening hours, a sense of life gradually draining from the building before somebody eventually converts it into expensive housing.
And whenever it happens, something larger seems to vanish with it.
Because a good pub is not merely a business serving drinks.
Historically, British pubs were woven directly into the functioning of everyday life. They acted as coaching stops, meeting places, hiring halls, informal council chambers, resting points for travellers, venues for celebrations and wakes, and the one place where people from completely different walks of life routinely crossed paths.
That role still survives in some places today.
The more walks I complete, the more I find myself drawn not just to the buildings themselves, but to the communities orbiting around them. There is often a noticeable difference in places where a pub remains healthy and genuinely integrated into local life. People know one another. Conversations begin naturally. Trust feels more visible. There is a kind of relaxed social cohesion that modern life increasingly struggles to create elsewhere.
It is difficult to quantify, but easy to recognise when you encounter it. It's an inter-dependence.
And perhaps that is why the loss of pubs feels disproportionately sad. When a pub closes, a community does not simply lose somewhere to buy a pint. It loses one of the last remaining spaces where unstructured human interaction still happens naturally.
Modern life has become astonishingly efficient at isolating people from one another.
We order online. We work remotely. We communicate digitally. We consume entertainment individually. Even many cafés and restaurants now feel transactional rather than communal. But pubs — especially old inns and village locals — still create opportunities for repeated human contact between people who would otherwise remain strangers.
A walker chats to a farmer.
An angler speaks with a local couple.
Young Farmers gather beside retirees.
Visitors from overseas become temporary participants in village life.
These interactions sound small, but collectively they form something profoundly important: community trust, familiarity and belonging.
And then there’s the history.
One of the unexpected joys of Pubs Worth the Walk has been discovering how much of Britain’s story still quietly survives inside its inns, coaching houses and riverside taverns. Old pubs are accidental museums. They explain landscapes better than textbooks.
A riverside inn suddenly reveals the importance of chalk streams, trade routes and fly fishing culture. A coaching inn explains the old road network before railways transformed the country. Estate pubs illuminate centuries of land ownership, aristocratic influence and rural economics. Even pub signs themselves often preserve fragments of Civil War loyalties, agricultural history or vanished industries.
I’ve found myself connecting historical dots I barely understood at school.
And all of this happens while doing something wonderfully simple:
walking into a pub.
That, ultimately, is why the project exists.
Pubs Worth the Walk is my small attempt to encourage people not to walk past these places, but to step inside them. To see them not simply as somewhere to drink, but as living parts of Britain’s landscape, history and community life.
Because once these places disappear, recreating what they provided is far harder than most people realise.
And thankfully, many are still here.
Waiting beneath old beams, beside rivers, on village greens and at the end of muddy footpaths.
Still doing what they have always done best: bringing people together.
