There was dismay but no surprise when local people learned that a builder had bought the Black Horse Inn in Walcote, and in due course the scruffy but much loved old pub was indeed flattened. The surprise came when it was rebuilt, closely resembling the original but set further back from the roaring trunk road which bisects the Leicestershire village.
The reborn Black Horse this week won one of the rarest awards in British design, the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) New Build Pub prize. The real ale campaign's design awards have for 20 years rewarded sensitive conversions and restorations - but the prize for a brand new pub has been presented only on a handful of occasions.
Steven Parissien, an art historian and chairman of the judges, says the Black Horse partly won because the rebirth of a village pub is so rare, now that he sees the British pub "at risk as never before".
Camra calculates that almost 60 pubs a month are being lost, "shut by their owners, heedless of the social and economic ramifications of such appalling moves of corporate sabotage", as he puts it.
"Closing a much-cherished local robs a community of its heart and soul - and of its economic lifeblood, as visiting sports teams, let alone younger local residents, eschew what is fast becoming a social graveyard for more lively, dynamic and neighbourly communities. The pub is at the hub of our way of life."
He admits The Black Horse won't be to everyone's taste: plain redbrick outside, plain inside, "admirably plain" he says firmly. His judge's report calls it: "A pub which has both critics and defenders, but one which we feel on balance deserves an award, if only to celebrate the Phoenix-like rebirth of the village's social focus."
The surrounding Leicestershire villages are speckled with large houses with tell tale patches on the walls where the old pub sign once hung. In the next village the White Lion, a once handsome coaching in, is boarded up, and in Walcote itself planning permission has been granted for housing on the site of the only other pub.
When builder Andy Clipston bought an old orchard for housing, the pub came with it, and though he could probably have got planning permission, the Black Horse was his own local, where he stopped on the way home from work for a pint of real ale and a Thai take away. He'd never pulled a pint in his life, but took a short course in cellar keeping from a former barman, closed for seven months, and completely rebuilt the pub. He now works nights and weekends behind the bar, where he has added a cappuccino machine, a few pots of orchids and some candles, but kept the Thai menu - one man drives regularly from Birmingham for a takeaway - and a few pieces of the old furniture, along with the photograph of the oldest regular, the late Jack Silver, supping his specially brewed 80th birthday pint.
The old pub, originally a house and butcher's, had had it, he says - over 200 years old, not a straight line in the building, with the roof held up by a rotting tree trunk. His youngest son, nine-year-old Callum, helping out in half term, stubbornly preferred it.
In the past the new build award has gone to the bar attached to the new art gallery in Walsall, and an 18th-century barn in Kent so rotten it had to be completely rebuilt before conversion into a pub.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
