Neil Scott

The Clutha on Stockwell Steet recently sent around a flyer outlining their new marketing strategy. It consists — wait for it — of selling food and drink so cheap a tramp could afford to dine out there every night and still have money for a pint of meths.

In the age of Wetherspoons and Yates you’d think it would be difficult to make food and drink much cheaper than they already are, but the Clutha are trying hard. They are currently offering a 3 course meal for only £3. The menu consists of such delicacies as Lentil soup or Scotch Broth for starter, Fish and Chips or Burger and Chips for main, and Vanilla Ice Cream or Strawberry Ice Cream for dessert.

It doesn’t sound like a strategy primed for success. No one ever made much money from being the cheapest — the best value, maybe, but not the cheapest. With these kind of prices and menus, the Clutha are saying to their clientele “you are scum, fit only for bargain basement fare.” When I was a child, going out for a pub meal at, say, the local Beefeater was a special occasion. No more!

Of course, the pub has never really been the same since they changed the name from The Clutha Vaults and replaced the classic old signage with glossy gold on plastic Wetherspoons-style lettering. I didn’t complain at the time, because I am in love with new forms and disdain authenticity but I now see that there was definitely something malign in the introduction of continental cafe outdoor seating.

Perhaps the reason for this terrible situation is that the Clutha is in intense competition with the Scotch Corner and The Scotia Bar, the other two pubs that make up the “Stockwell Triangle”. All three offer similarly priced beer and live music, none of them seem able to differentiate themselves from each other. There is an interesting page on the Scotia website about the history of the area which helps illustrate the kind of changes that have formed this curious situation.

Talking about the Clutha at lunch, a colleague suggested that they might be trying to use the Ryanair strategy of ultracheapness. I disagreed, saying that the beauty of Ryanair is that they discovered that people didn’t want a meal and a film, they really just wanted to get from A to B. With food, don’t people take account of taste and quality? Possibly not, especially not in anhedonic Glasgow where they wolf down the most grossly fatty food imaginable.