British Cultural History

I travel a lot with business and more and more I am coming across boarded up pubs.
The hearts have been ripped out of the British People
While I am not a smoker and find a clean pub so much easier to breathe in - the banning of smoking probably marked the end of the British Pub culture.
Something about the heart having been ripped out of these places, pubs used to be frequented at the end of the day -
where men came together to have a good old blarney and let go of frustrations before going home to the wife.
I stopped in an old pub the other day and there was a man singing, random lines of an old song and it took me back - back to the days where we all used to sing together.
At the tops of our voices, some fantastic songs like We will rock you, Summer of 69, Nights in white Satin to name only a few....
The heart of the village was the pub, all the news could be heard there, if some one in the neighbourhood was in need it was in the pub that it would be sorted.
Some how the banning of smoking and the rigid rules and legislation that has been put on our pubs has taken the one source of solidarity away from our neighbourhoods...
To have a culture you need people to be united,
due to the economic crisis we face today
and the way pubs and human freedom have been governed
we are becoming alienated from each other..

Often I have heard it asked what is British culture?
Sadly it is history ....