Dylan Cleaver: Calling time on the classic pub

Mable's pub in Euston has served Kiwi journalists well as a war room and refuelling stop during the Olympics. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It's time to celebrate the classic English pub.

Note the absence of "in" before "the". There will be a time for that - coinciding with the closing ceremony, approximately - but this is a tribute to the institution itself, the public house.

Despite our shared heritage, somewhere along the line New Zealand veered away from the ethos of a shared dwelling to booze barns and bars.

It's a shame. A good pub can offer a comforting embrace.

It's a place where you can swap your tales of the day, complain about your boss/ editor/ butler and have a bit of a graze.

The fact you're doing it with a pint of best bitter in your hand is almost incidental.

Diarist Samuel Pepys believed the public house was the heart of England and while it might now be truer of smaller towns and communities, there is still an element of it in London, (although they're under serious attack from bland chain bars full of blinking lights and tinny music).

But research suggests the good days are numbered.

While there are 52,000 pubs in Great Britain, two are closing every day. At this rate, by the year 2083, there will not be a pub in the land.

Within a 1km radius of our hotel there are more watering holes than we could have hoped to visit if the Olympics went for a month, so you can see why some might be struggling. There is market saturation, so to speak.

Some of them look dreadful, but Mabel's Tavern of Mabledon Place was winking at us from the moment we checked in. It has served well as an unofficial war room.

A good range of pub nosh - avoid the nachos though - is complemented by a range of cask ales from the Shepherd Neame brewery. Make mine a Bishop's Finger, please.

It's what a pub should be. The atmosphere is inviting and there's nobody chundering in the bogs.

Best of all, at lunchtime on Sundays, the place is fair humming with families out for a hot dinner.

If traditional pubs are dying, it's good to see they're dying hard.