phweakazoid retweeted
Marston's threat shows the damage cost is doing to hospitality.
The threatened closure of Marston's Brewery in Burton upon Trent should be ringing alarm bells in Westminster. I lead Staffordshire County Council and I've worked in hospitality since the early 80s, and I've never seen our sector in a worse state. Since COVID, it has been battered, and the biggest reason is cost.
Burton upon Trent, here in Staffordshire, is Britain's capital of brewing. If brewing is in trouble here, it's in trouble everywhere.
My heart goes out to every worker at Marston's and their families. For some, this brewery has been a way of life for generations, passed down from grandparents to parents to children. They are worried sick right now, and they deserve every effort we can make to keep it open.
Carlsberg Britvic points to falling cask ale sales. Sales of all alcohol are down. But that's only part of the picture. There has been a huge drop in people going out and socialising, and a large number of pubs, bars and clubs have closed their doors. 161 pubs shut in the first three months of this year alone, nearly two a day. A third of our nightclubs have gone since 2020.
This is far more than a change in society. One of the biggest reasons is cost.
I owned and ran what I believe is the UK's longest-running nightclub under the same owner. Trust me, at today's costs, much of our sector is simply not economically viable.
Our hospitality sector is one of the most heavily taxed in Europe. Take VAT. We charge 20%. France, Spain and Italy charge 10%. Germany has cut VAT on restaurant food to 7%. The European average is 12.8%.
Then there's beer and alcohol duty, again among the highest in Europe. Our brewers pay twelve times more duty than brewers in Germany or Spain. After all that, a pub makes around 12p on a pint.
Add the red tape and the never-ending legislation, and you can see why so many good operators are handing back the keys.
I've written to the Minister to discuss how we save this brewery, and I've asked Carlsberg Britvic for a meeting to find out where the pressures are, and how we can help.
VAT is the problem. But so is beer duty, and most certainly business rates and energy costs. Together they are killing off the Great British pub.
This matters far beyond the balance sheet. Humans are social creatures. We need to get out, see each other, talk and laugh together. When that stops happening, people suffer. You can see it in the rise in mental health problems, especially among our younger generation.
A pint of beer is as British as a cup of tea. The Great British pub is as English as the village green. And brewing in Burton is as historic as it gets. Monks at Burton Abbey were brewing beer here more than a thousand years ago.
We must save our traditions and our heritage sites. Marston's has brewed in Burton since 1834, its Shobnall Road brewery has been making beer since 1875, and it still brews Bass, a name that goes back to 1777.
This brewery should definitely be treated as a heritage site. Not as some museum piece, but as a viable business with a future.
Martin Murray
Leader, Staffordshire County Council
#SaveNightlife #SaveHospitality #SaveMarstons
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@UKHofficial @morningad @CAMRA_Official @ntiaofficial @Ben_Bradley_32 @CarlsbergUK @UKHospKate – at Cannock, England
phweakazoid retweeted
Someone’s cut the new trees down on Digbeth High Street. – at Birmingham, England
phweakazoid retweeted
I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.
Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.
Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.
Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.
After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.
New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?
worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…
phweakazoid retweeted
The unhinged level of parental interference here would have driven me insane at 9, never mind 19. – at Bulgaria
phweakazoid retweeted
The Pugin masterpiece demolished for a ring road. countrylife.co.uk/directory/…
phweakazoid retweeted
The Oval “S” That Still Walks the World.
Albe Steiner, a leading figure in Italian modernist design, created the Superga logo in 1962. Born in 1913 and shaped by Bauhaus principles, he favoured clean typography, precise geometry, and the intelligent use of negative space.
For the Turin footwear brand famous for its classic canvas sneakers, Steiner designed a bold white “S” set inside a simple red or black oval, paired with crisp Helvetica lettering. The result was dynamic yet restrained, perfectly matching Superga’s sporty, everyday character.
Minor updates arrived in 2001 and 2011, but the core form has remained remarkably consistent. Steiner’s mark continues to travel the world on millions of sneakers, proving that quiet, functional design can outlast trends.
#logodecks
phweakazoid retweeted
“Voyage, Voyage” is the biggest hit by French singer Desireless (Claudie Fritsch-Mentrop). Written by Jean-Michel Rivat and Dominique Dubois and released in 1986, the atmospheric synth-pop song became an unexpected international phenomenon despite being sung entirely in French. It reached No. 1 in Germany, Austria, Norway and Spain, while peaking at No. 2 in France, where it remained there for four weeks. Its dramatic vocals, electronic production and mysterious atmosphere made it one of the defining European synth-pop hits of the 1980s.
Desireless was relatively unknown before “Voyage, Voyage,” and she never matched the song's enormous international success. In the UK the original recording reached No. 53 in 1987, while a 1988 remix climbed to No. 5. Despite becoming a major hit across Europe, the song did not enter the US Billboard charts. The music video, directed by photographer Bettina Rheims, features American actor David Caruso, who was still at the beginning of his acting career at the time.
phweakazoid retweeted
The @metpoliceuk's new Sur-Ron bikes are helping officers get where offenders think they cannot. Neighbourhood crime is already down 14% over the last year, and @MOPACldn and I are determined to keep up that progress. Take a look at them in action.
phweakazoid retweeted
We've set our society up such that it expected that you will drive to work.
To pick on a specific example, we have a single accounting firm, south of the bridge, whose expensive building hosts 2000 employees.
It can take 2 hours to get to work on a bad day if you live North of the bridge.
Successive governments have proposed spending billions building a tunnel, or a bridge.
The alternative would be to have two buildings - one either side of the bridge, hosting 1000 each.
In the former case, my taxes would be paying for me to have a long commute. The latter case makes more sense from every perspective I can think of.
Extrapolate the example - and you will see that we have rather fucked things up, spending a fortune uglifying our environment and normalizing an economically inefficient use of human resource - i.e. the commute.
We should at least talk about reversing this path in the long term, at a societal level.
phweakazoid retweeted
Absolute f**^ing lunatics!! That’s clearly my beer of the year so far, and the best beer I’ve drunk for a very long time. Stunning, absolutely stunning!
phweakazoid retweeted
I totally envision Trump renaming the San Andreas Fault to Joe Biden’s Fault, and I am just putting this out there so I can say I predicted it one day.
phweakazoid retweeted
The "mile-for-mile" pedestrian casualty rates being quoted include motorways and major A-roads. Those roads account for about 65% of all UK motor vehicle miles (DfT), yet pedestrians are essentially absent from them. That skews the comparison.
If you remove those miles and look only at the remaining ~35% (the roads where pedestrians actually are), the car/taxi pedestrian casualty rate jumps by about 2.86×:
- Original (all roads, figures from your tweet): 0.85 deaths / 16.17 serious / 17.02 KSI per billion miles
- Adjusted (roads with pedestrians): ~2.43 deaths / ~46.2 serious / ~48.6 KSI per billion miles
Cycling stays at 0.37 deaths / 45.45 serious / 45.82 KSI per billion miles, because almost all cycling already happens on minor/urban roads.
Bottom line: on like-for-like roads, pedestrian KSI rates for cars and cycles are broadly similar (though slightly higher for cars: 48.6 KSI vs 45.82 KSI), while car-attributed deaths remain significantly higher.
Cyclists are most definitely not "dead against anything to keep themselves or others safer." We would all be happier with dedicated and protected lanes free of large motorised vehicles and pedestrians who wander into our paths without looking.
