Pubs Facing 'Significant Pressure' To Open As 'Super Saturday' Gets Underway
Publicans have described facing “significant pressure” to open on Saturday in the wake of the government’s announcement that they could welcome back customers.
Despite polling carried out by the i newspaper finding that fewer than one in ten people in England intended to head to pubs and restaurants on their reopening weekend, owners and staff up and down the country are bracing for the arrival of thousands of people on “super Saturday”.
Pubs were officially allowed to open from 6am on Saturday, and leading political figures have encouraged the public to support their locals – with MP Jacob Rees Mogg calling on pub-goers to “go back to drinking a yard of ale”.
After more than three months without income, many publicans are desperate to reopen – but there are concerns that the hype around the further easing of lockdown measures has left them “obliged” to do so, even in the face of health fears.
Damon Horrill, who runs a small network of pubs in Cheshire, told HuffPost UK that publicans had felt “significant pressure” to open their doors, even if they had concerns about the government’s July 4 opening date.
He said: “There’s a lot of pressure on landlords to open, regardless of whether or not they think it’s the right thing to do because, in customers’ minds, we’re supposed to.
“The reaction has been very positive towards reopening. We haven’t trialled saying: ‘We’re not going to open on July 4’ so we don’t know what the reaction would have been, but the general consensus is that if we didn’t open we would have been going against government guidelines and would be wrong to do so.
“The research we did leading up to opening indicated that if we didn’t open we would be perceived as going against the guidance and restricting customers’ liberties, as opposed to doing something safe.
“That was very much part of our decision making, the fact that we felt obliged to, from the customers’ point of view,...
