MeVsWorld

In every good pub guide and on every real ale website you will find mention of a pub that is local to me, the Boat inn, a 400 year old riverside inn, situated on the Ashleworth Quay in Gloucestershire.

Almost every review of this inn will praise the fact that this small riverside cottage has been in the same family for 400 years, serve real ale and farmhouse cider, from the cask in their small front room bar.

Tourists flock there in the summer, many are shocked by what they find and more importantly how they are treated; you see the reality of this place is that it is indeed a piece of history preserved, and some history is very ugly indeed.

I used to be a huge fan of this pub, like so many others I would rave about its unspoiled charm, but I was naive. I am white, English and local.

To my horror, the day (my birthday as it happens) I took some friends to this pub I was to discover a dark throwback to a historical England, an England filled with small mindedness and racial hate.

One of my friends had to endure a torrent of verbal racial abuse, and we left. The next day I was informed that I was no longer welcome there. The details of that particular night are very unpleasant.

Gob smacked and rendered speechless by what was happening I left silently, however it was not long before the family that own this pub tried to spread rumours about me. None of these stuck however because it is widely known locally that the individual responsible for the attack was capable of this behaviour.

He had previously been sacked from another local establishment for a similar thing so when the landlord believed his story over mine plus 5 witnesses it was like finding out a best friend whom you had trusted and defended for years was actually a criminal.

To this day, reviews pop up on the internet telling stories of abuse and refusal of service for one reason or another, these are mainly taken down swiftly by worried publishers or perhaps the pub itself.

Some may think it’s amusing to be greeted by this surly hostile attitude, some travel for miles expecting to find something wonderful and end up upset, disappointed and offended; still this remains a favourite pub for the guide books, I wonder why.

I suspect the main reason for the best pub awards and the loving reviews is the fact that the pub has not changed for hundreds of years, but are some things simply best left in the past?

I’m sure if a village in England still used the stocks for minor offences, practiced the public burning of witches and the torture and execution of the mentally unwell we would not all flock to visit and preserve that way of life.

My point is that we almost always look favourably and even lovingly on anything that preserves the past, often blind to the unpleasant element of the past that comes with preserving it. We learn and grow and advance as a race and as a society for a reason, and maybe there is a reason why Inns such as this are now so rare.