The Mermaid

The Mermaid Inn on the Main Road through Christian Malford, Wiltshire, pictured some time during the 1990s.

Whitbread used the Flowers name as a marketing gimmick. They hoped you would believe you were getting beer with a long pedigree and heritage. Yet Whitbread had moved production from one place to another on a whim. Whitbread was devoted to their profit margins, not their products. If the beer tasted alright it was down to the brewer’s skill in overcoming the changed water supply and brewing apparatus. What happened to local English beer after the second world war was a national tragedy and a triumph for big business.

According to a report in the ‘Wiltshire Gazette and Herald’ of June 2011, this historic pub has been empty and desolate since 2009. The new owner, it was reported, has ambitions to transform The Mermaid into a wine bar, cafe and flats.

Christian Malford is a village in two parts and The Mermaid is in the wrong part, remote from The Green and Church Road. Once it could survive on passing trade; then the M4 motorway was built in the early 1970s and falling volumes of traffic on Main Road resulted in it being downgraded to a lower status of highway. Faced with that and the increasing popularity of drinking cheap supermarket alcohol at home instead of going to the pub, The Mermaid concentrated on the food side of pub enterprise but evidently, even before the economy went into recession, it was not enough to save the business from closure. Just another failed pub statistic, but The Mermaid, for all its Grade II listed building status and imposing architecture, has lacked the charm and attractive setting that a pub needs to be a survivor. The featureless expanse of tarmac at the front, marked out like a supermarket car park, contributes little to its visual appeal. Once it was relieved by an old stepped mounting stone for getting astride your horse, but that was taken away, presumably for some safety reason lest a customer collided with it on his way out (or even worse, his way in). Or maybe the number of equestrian customers dwindled and an opportunity to squeeze in another car space was irresistible.

The Mermaid is a sad pub in a depressing place. None of the neighbouring properties do anything to lift it. It faces north, and so even the sun won’t shine on it properly. Alas! Poor Mermaid.