Look after your local pub, because if you don't, some s**t of a property developer will buy it and wreck it

Marcus Berkmann's local, The Winchester, has been bought by developers and turned into into flats

Illustration by Ping Zhu

This is a time of loss and grief in my area, but the thing that makes me angriest is the pub at the end of the road. To see it closed and neglected isn't like losing a family member, as one of my neighbours suggested. It's more like having a family member locked up in a basement by a lunatic for several years. Someone should make a film about it. The entire area is in suspended mourning. You want to tell people, look after your local pub, give it a substantial proportion of your income, because if you don't, some shit of a property developer will buy it and wreck it.

I started going to the Winchester in the early 1980s, mainly because it was my friend Patrick's local, and partly because it was called the Winchester, although it pre-dated the seedy little boozer in Minder by several decades. It was owned and run by a fearsome Irishwoman with a voice like a punch in the guts and a personality only marginally less intimidating. Elderly, befuddled Irishmen were its main clientele, and old Irish tunes dominated its jukebox.

But what particularly characterised the Winchester was its vastness. The ceilings were high enough to give you vertigo, and the science-fiction landscapes on the wall, purchased in bulk from Woolworths, gave you a headache. For the hungry, two clingfilmed cheese rolls of uncertain age were displayed behind the bar. Very few people were that hungry. Instead, most of us ate our own bodyweight in dry-roasted peanuts. There were two lagers on tap and one of them was Skol. It was paradise.

In time the terrifying Irishwoman died and the pub was inherited by her son Pat and his wife, Val. I'm not sure I've ever seen two people work harder for longer. They redecorated. They started to offer proper food. Younger people started to show up. They included Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who lived nearby and would later name the pub in Shaun of the Dead in the Winchester's honour. Not that I knew them or would have recognised them, for as I say, it was a big pub.

I met my friends there most Friday evenings for 20 years. Otherwise I used it as an escape from the pressures of life, somewhere to sit peacefully while MTV or Sky Sports blared away in the background and the elderly Irishmen yelled at each other trying to be heard. Every so often one of them would die, and his photograph would be displayed behind the bar, where the cheese rolls used to be. It seemed only appropriate.

And in all those years I exchanged maybe 30 words with the landlord, Pat, which suited us both fine. Sometimes there's too much conversation in the world. The first time we had a really good chat was at their farewell party. They had sold up for trillions and were going back to Ireland for a long rest. They deserved it. But the purchasers have since turned this huge building into flats, which no one seems to live in. If they remain empty, rumours that they have been bought by foreign criminals for money-laundering purposes, like much of the rest of London, will no doubt circulate.

In January we heard that the developers had applied to turn part of the bar area into two more flats, which would have been the end of the pub, but the council has turned them down. They will surely appeal. Their entire business model rests on there never being a pub there ever again. I hate these people. They deserve pain, disease and agonising death. Mine's a pint of lager, with two packets of cheese and onion crisps.