For thousands of years the most importan...

For thousands of years the most important two buildings in any British village have been the church and the pub. In fact，until a place has a church and a pub，it isn’t really considered a community worthy of a name. Traditionally，the church and the pub are at the heart of any village or town, since it is where people gather to give and receive news. In fact, the word ‘pub’ is short for public house’.

That's how it used to be, but things are beginning to change. It is said that the credit decline is causing 39 British pubs a week to go out of business. People don’t have lots of spare money to spend on beer. Recently, the UK government banned smoking in all pubs, and that may also have affected the number of customers going to pubs.

This decline is happening despite the fact that in 2005 the UK government started to allow pubs to stay open after 11 p. m. Previously，with 11 p. m. as closing time，customers would have to drink quite quickly，meaning they sometimes got more drunk than they would if allowed to drink slowly. The British habit of drinking a lot very quickly is known as ‘binge drinking’(狂饮)，and it causes some long-term health problems for people and problems with violent crime for communities. The UK government is changing the law to discourage binge drinking, and regularly spends money on television advertisements to warn people of the problems of drinking too much.

In order to save their businesses, pubs are trying to change with the market. Now, there are a number of different types of pubs.

As you can see, British pubs now offer something for everyone. A lot of pubs used to be working men’s clubs, meaning that women could not usually enter. Today, however, women can freely enter 99% of pubs without experiencing any problems. Perhaps things are changing for the better after all.