Everyone knows the pub bore.

He’s the yellow-jowelled jackal with thinning hair leaning over a pint of flat ale at the end of the bar, eyeing each person who walks through the door with glass-eyed desperation.

Ready to pounce on any moment of politeness, he’ll lock his victim in with an interminable ramble stuffed with self-aggrandising anecdotes of implausible past glories, before hinting that he’d like you to buy him a pint.

In recent years The Good Pub Guide – once a formidable ally of British drinking – has started to resemble less a drinking buddy and more this very creature.

In 2012 it decided to start charging pubs £200 to feature in its listings then a year later, declared that 4,000 British pubs ‘deserve’ to close down at a time when landlords are struggling more than ever.

The reason? Because too many are ‘stuck in the 1980s’, offering ‘indifferent food, drink and service’. It’s time, according to the Bible of imbibing, that more local pubs ‘diversify’ with the changing times.

where else do we have left where a person can be alone without feeling lonely?

As someone who has gone from buying £1.80 pints in Northumbrian Working Men’s Clubs to sipping overpriced Soho cocktails out of tea cups, I wonder if that is what we really want.

To some, a pub that has ‘moved with the times’ means the kind of place where a polished Aspall tap winks at you from the bar as you sit down to a Jenga pile of hand-cut, goose fat chips.

Where on the table next to you, a cheerful young couple compete good-naturedly over a game of Scrabble as handsome staff wearing clean white aprons hover with plates of gourmet black pudding and tin buckets of £35 bottles of wine (shop price: £6.99).

In short: perfectly pleasant places that are nevertheless anodyne, bereft of soul and lacking in any kind of excitement.

Don’t get me wrong: a good cocktail or wine bar is a very nice thing, and pubs that put a real focus on quality food are among the best places to eat in the country. Too many, though, particularly in London, think all this takes is to convert half their floor space into a dining room and charge £18 for an adequate Sunday roast.

Good luck to them. But surely there is still a place for the traditional local boozer, those dusty cocoons of cushioned velvet stained with the detritus of a thousand ‘cheers’, those sacred retreats where wobbly pints are passed over split packets of salty pig parts and you can watch the football sharing gruff exchanges with a stranger one moment and be hugging him the next.

A few years ago I was temporarily homeless at the end of a failed relationship. Wandering aimlessly, I found a pub like this, on Tottenham Court Road.

Every Saturday for a month or so, to give whichever friend I was imposing myself on that week a break, I took to shuffling in and taking a place among the uneven bar stools to sip a pint and watch whatever football was on the telly.

Two old cockney boys were sat there at the bar every time. They knew everyone who walked in and greeted them loudly, buying pints of John Smiths from the warm-smiling Polish barmaid, counting out pockets full of coppers onto the sticky bar top.

After a while, they took me under their wing. We’d talk about the game and the wider world. It turned out they’d been friends ever since they played together in their local boy’s team. The teased me for my youth, and themselves for their old age. I never got to know them very well, but they were a welcome distraction from my own sorry troubles.

A few months later, life decidedly more on track, I returned to find the same building had been transformed into a ‘gastro pub’.

The knackered seats and peeling wallpaper had been replaced with retro avant-garde furniture and shiny mirrors. Where once crisps dangled unhealthily behind the bar, a blackboard boasted of the happily butchered organic animals. Inside, co-workers bleated at each other in segregated huddles.

It looked perfectly nice.

I didn’t go in.

Who knows what became of the old boys. But their simple kindness reminded me that pubs – as Tom Parker Bowles put it beautifully for Esquire – are ‘Britain’s secular churches’, one of the only places we have left where strangers can become friends, and a person can be alone without feeling lonely.

So what if some of them are incapable of serving any more than a pork pie and an out-of-date packet of Beef McCoy’s? Or if the bar is manned by a grumpy fat bloke instead of a team of professionally happy post-grad students?

In an old school pub, one lit by the grubby glow of gambling machines, where the air turns blue and the beer spills unselfconsciously, there is a freedom to act that bit more openly, to touch the hems of a social fabric we once thought as 'community'. These old dives, closing down at a rate of 26 a week, still provide this as they have done for centuries. We'll miss them when they're gone.

This is a slightly edited version of an article that first appear on Esquire in 2013.