Essential Guides
Is your local pub threatened with closure?
‘Saving Your Local Pub’ is CAMRA’s go-to guide, providing in-depth support and advice on the practicalities of campaigning to save a pub, options available, and how to use the planning system to combat unwanted change.
If your local pub is threatened with closure or damaging alteration and you want to do something about it, we hope this guidance will help and inform you. It focuses on the practicalities of campaigning to save a pub and on how to use the planning system to combat unwanted changes.
In recent years, pub closures have remained high. A combination of factors, such as falling footfall and soaring property prices is leading to many owners shutting down their pubs and converting the buildings to another use. The good news is that many successful campaigns have been fought to stave off closures. There are numerous thriving pubs up and down the country which would otherwise have been converted to private houses or heaps of rubble without the efforts of local campaigners.
Although this guide looks at how to fight attempted closures, the same basic approaches and tactics apply if the threats are of a lesser but still unwanted kind, such as proposals for major alterations which would spoil the pub’s character.
See also Saving Your Local Pub in Scotland: Full guidance on how to protect your local pub in Scotland
See also Saving Your Local Pub in Wales: Full guidance on how to protect your local pub in Wales
A comprehensive toolkit for campaigners covering saving your local pub (Wales-specific)
A comprehensive toolkit for campaigners covering saving your local pub (Scotland-specific)
This document offers an overview of the National Planning Policy Framework for pub campaigners (Jan 2019)
Help for those wishing to object to an application which can adversely affect a pub (Jan 2019).