Sacred and profane meet across the bar

Archie Mitchell met his end via Queen Victoria in EastEnders. Photo / Supplied

Pubs made a setting ideal for secrecy, murky as a pint of mild, but also open to the unexpected: the bang of the door, the stranger entering, the sudden galvanising piece of news.

The provision of drink to all-comers was a task both sacred and profane, and pubs reflected that dangerous ambiguity.

The medieval alehouse, in which the poet John Langland's peasants drank themselves insensible, was often built in the lee of an abbey or a church from which the customers, including clergy, came direct.

The Victorian gin palace was a church itself, equipped with coruscating lights and screens to dazzle the poor sodden souls who took refuge there.

The "improved public houses" of the 1950s tried to look like dull suburban hotels. But no matter how pubs scrubbed themselves up or put in "family rooms", disrepute still dogged them.

No wonder that the Queen Vic in popular British TV soap EastEnders was the scene of three extramarital impregnations, two criminal raids, two murders and, in September, a calamitous fire, probably arson, which burned it to the ground.

Drama suits pubs. They are places for pushing limits, and not just in the sense of jars and fists.

Pubs are where the first workers' associations met to demand higher wages, and where (at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand) proper electoral reform was first floated.

When pubs are swallowed up, or die, something very much more than a beer-shop perishes with them.