DUNCAN BARKES Berkeley giving pub a helping hand? Now I'll drink to that...

My love of the traditional British pub is well documented. Integral to the identity of Great Britain, pubs offer conviviality, conversation and, more importantly, a sense of community in an increasingly insular society.

Sadly, pubs are closing at an alarming rate. A combination of cheap supermarket booze, the smoking ban and the fact roughly one-third of the price of a pint is tax (excise duty and VAT, greedily swallowed up by the chancellor) make operating a boozer extremely challenging.

David Cameron keeps banging on about the Big Society which, if I understand it correctly, means taking collective responsibility for where we live and what we do for each other.

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Such ideology requires a local hub. Well, here’s the good news: these places don’t need to be created. They already exist in the form of our local pubs, where fun, fundraising and friendship thrive.

In this part of Sussex we have excellent pubs providing all of the above and more, as landlords constantly have to dream up ways of keeping customers who might otherwise buy their beer with their weekly shop.

One boozer I really feel for at the moment is the Royal Oak in North Bersted. Affectionately known as the ‘pink pub’, it is a shining beacon on the A259.

As well as overcoming the challenges pubs currently face, the Royal Oak has had to endure the ongoing nightmare caused by almost continuous road works, the result of a nearby housing development being built by Berkeley. Most of us can probably recount a gridlock story on this stretch of the A259 experienced at some point this year.

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Luckily the Royal Oak has much to recommend it and its charms are well appreciated by a fiercely loyal customer base. But one wonders how much of an impact the nearby construction work has had on trade.

With the creation of Berkeley’s Bersted Park comes a ready-made community that will hopefully support their local boozer. Given many pubs are fighting for their lives at the moment, the additional traffic jam problems, making access for customers about as easy as getting a cocktail in a convent, have surely added to the pink pub’s challenges.

So, how about Berkeley demonstrating its commitment to the community, which, of course, its newly-created development is now part of, and bunging the Royal Oak a few quid to make up for a year which has seen the pub having to pull out all the stops to keep pulling the pints?

Go on Berkeley, do the decent thing and I’m sure I won’t be alone in raising a glass to you.