Remember the Survivors.com

Hi,

I'm Ken Loxley. I'm 47 and I own a pub with a couple of guest rooms in the South of England. Many people think that it must be a dream job having a pub, maybe it was many years ago but these days it's a lot of work for very little reward.

On average 40 pubs a week are closing their doors forever. There are lots of reasons, some of which include the smoking ban, high government taxes on alcohol and supermarkets selling cheap booze. I was reading last week that one huge supermarket was "selling" booze at below cost price just to entice customers into their stores. How is a small country pub supposed to compete against such behemoths ?.

Luckily for us, we have a well respected restaurant and in fact the majority of our business is now from food rather than alcohol. We don't have our own web site (it's on the to-do list) but we are listed in this Hampshire Hotels website