Amol Rajan

speaker

3,997 appearances 23 recordings 6 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.

Appearances

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Radical · Last Call for the Local: Are Old Pubs the Solution to Modern Crises? (Oisín Rogers) · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

When there's a pub called The Eagle in Cambridge, when Crick and Watson discovered DNA or the double helix structure, they walked in there and they kind of celebrated it. matched

There's the amount of time that Tolkien spent in, as it happens in Oxford, talking about, I think with C.S. matched

Lewis, about plots for places that would go on to be called Narnia or indeed where The Lord of the Rings was set. matched

And there is this kind of incredible sense which pubs have kind of been weaved through our history, architecture, meetings, political movements. matched

You can't really understand Britain going back several hundred years without understanding the role the pubs played in sparking relationships and conversations and movements. matched

Why then are they struggling? matched

I mean, the numbers are totally, totally nuts. matched

And I've got a big thing about I want people listening to this podcast to always be able to take away really astonishing facts. matched

In 2024, and there's obviously going to be a complicated number of answers to this question, which we're going to interrogate. matched

In 2024, the British Beer and Pub Association said 289 pubs closed across England and Wales. matched

That's around six a week, six a week, with more than 4,500 job losses attached. matched

For 4,500 people, A, losing your job is a scarring, painful experience. matched

B, there is just this profound sense of what are these people going to do if they've got particular skills that are going to waste? matched

In 2025, the BBPA, that's the British Beer and Pub Association, warned Britain was on course to lose a pub every day. matched

And in the first quarter of 2026, 161 pubs. matched

161 in the first quarter this year, closing Great Britain roughly two a day. matched

That's up 26% year on year. matched

These are... matched

totally astonishing figures and just to really spell it out what is happening it's not the case that necessarily by 2050 all pubs will be gone because there'll be some that continue to be successful but we are talking about the accelerating disappearance of something that's been integral to our history get into the detail but in broad terms what do you think is going on matched

So that's a sort of commercial thing, and I'm going to dive into that. matched

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