Janet Street-Porter: And they wonder why we drink at home

Pubs in towns are drab, shabby places you'd hardly leave the DVD player to cross the road to enter

I doubt that many will be making the pilgrimage from my valley in North Yorkshire to the Great British Beer Festival at the Kensington Olympia in London this week. Why go in search of perfection when it is already on your doorstep? Up here in Nidderdale, village pubs are thriving, and any attempts to turn them into housing are firmly resisted. One pub in a village near Fountains Abbey has remained boarded up since the local council refused planning permission for it to be turned into a luxury home.

Yorkshire is definitely the county where men are men, and often have revolting wobbly beer guts to show for it. And I don't see many women delighting in all the many real ales on offer - for them sauvignon blanc is the beverage of choice. Only a couple of pubs in a huge geographical area have applied for the new 24-hour licences. Pubs up here really are the focus of the local community, with quiz nights, thriving cards and domino leagues, outings and parties.

The Campaign for Real Ale has conducted a survey which discovered that 300 pubs a year are closing, usually because the owners have found it is more profitable to sell them to a developer for offices or housing. At the same time, the Government's annual survey into what we buy to eat and drink has just been published, and it makes depressing reading. The results were compiled by asking nearly 17,000 people in more than 7,000 households all over Great Britain to keep a diary of their expenditure for two weeks, so it is a pretty exhaustive study.

In the year 2003-4, almost 10 per cent of all the money per person spent on food and drink each week to consume at home went on alcoholic beverages - about £2.65. That figure has risen by 10 per cent in a year and, at the same time, the amount of money spent on drinking outside the home has fallen by 5.5 per cent. In spite of all the Government's initiatives, directives and health campaigns, we are actually spending less each week on vegetables and white fish, and more on dairy products and processed cheese. When I read that the amount each week spent per person on fruit is a pitiful £1.60 and £1.80 on vegetables (not potatoes) I want to weep. For if the survey means that every man woman and child over the age of 13 in the country is now consuming almost a litre of alcohol a week, you can see that all the Government's directives about units and being sensible are not only doomed, but all public health advertising is failing miserably.

It seems as if we are turning into a nation of secret boozers. For all the fuss about young binge drinkers and the declaration of zero-tolerance zones by the police in many of our city centres this summer, the truth is that more people of all ages are getting drunk without ever bothering to step outside their front door. And instead of continually demonising the young, it would be more productive to look at why the country as a whole is buying more and more alcohol.

Once you drink at home, you no longer have the stigma of being seen to be pissed in public. If you are under 25 and still have to live at home because you cannot afford to enter the property market, it's not surprising that on a Friday and Saturday you will want to go to drinking establishments in city centres full of like-minded young people where the music is loud and the drink cheap. But why don't more adults like pubs? There is no point in Camra whingeing on about the demise of the local when most of these pubs only work in rural areas where they are hugely popular with the elderly, parents, and tourists. The concept of a local, where everyone knows your business, and local gossip is swapped over a pint, is anathema to anyone under 20.

Pubs in inner-city areas signed their death warrant when they decided to develop "themes" to attract customers. I've got news for brewers; most pubs are the single most unattractive places in Britain for an unaccompanied woman to spend any time in. To survive, you need a newspaper to read and a stomach that can deal with wine out of a box. In the country, a couple of old codgers will look at you as if you've descended from Mars, and in towns you just feel plain uneasy. Last Saturday, in the Scottish Borders, I entered a local hostelry and asked for a cup of tea. On the way to the loo, I was inspected by a trio of grizzled farmers at the bar, and one cheerily quipped "don't get lost!" Pubs are places where you go in with clean hair and come out smelling of Old Holborn and stale beer.

Camra talks of developing community pubs - there's naught wrong with that - but first they might have to accept that most pubs are places where men hang out and women are tolerated. Pubs and beer are inextricably linked, and no matter how much Camra may bleat, the fact is that most women don't want to drink bucketloads of a liquid which can add a couple of feet to your waistline. Far more appealing is the new low-alcohol, low-calorie 'lir' wine now being developed by French vineyards as part of their desperate struggle for new customers and fresh markets.

One of the reasons we are buying more booze and drinking it at home is precisely because we find the surroundings where we can consume it in public pretty uncongenial. Pubs in towns are often drab, shabby places you'd hardly leave the DVD player or plasma-screen television to cross the road to enter. At a time when we're spending more money on our homes, and becoming far more sophisticated in our taste in decorating, the appeal of the grime-streaked parlour at the Dog and Badger is diminishing. And the prices charged in pubs for glasses of mucky wine is shocking. What are we paying for? Not the décor - it can't be the creaky chairs or the cigarette burns on the fake leather seating. It can't be the TV blaring out a football match or the Muzak assaulting our ears with Engelbert Humperdink's greatest hits. And for every gastropub listed by guides and favourably reviewed by food critics, I can show you a dump where everything on the menu comes from some central hangar and the salad is something Auntie Eileen would have served in 1955.

There are 61,000 pubs in Britain, and probably a third of them could close without anyone other than the local alcoholic even noticing. Too many are owned or operated by companies that either make beer or import it - and as a result their boards are dominated by men, all their thinking is directed at men, and all their marketing has a certain machismo about it. I can't think of any other business which has decided so resolutely to ignore 50 per cent of its potential customers. Until publicans can stop sneering at non-beer drinkers and stop regarding wine bars as a threat (ie places where women from Bridget Jones to my sister like going), more pubs will close, more booze will be drunk at home, and I won't be sorry.