Another item on the importance of places where people just get to know each other, in the UK today it is illegal to close the last pub in a village. Why? Because

"The Pub is the Hub is not about pub preservation, it's about promoting social cohesion and community facilities."

SocietyGuardian's rural regeneration story Pint and a byte, please tells of new initiatives in the UK to outfit village pubs with internet access to further fullfill the mandate as the community hub.

I'm so jealous of the European culture that allows for the local brew pub to become the community well. Here in Ontario The Good, donut shops are our closest equivalent. The pub owners almost universally design their shops to be either dark and depressed or chromed for the Yuppie, loud places conduced to excess, not the sort of place that attracts all ages. True, some are lunch spots, almost exclusively in the business districts, wide tables for a sandwich and a meet-me-there. Few of ours serve that critical village community function of the "just grab a pint", the pivital everyday social functions we see across the pond. There's still a few you find in the deeply ethnic neighbourhoods such as Toronto's Chinatown or Little Italy, but somewhere between there and here the rest of us lost it, it got way-laid in our immigrant baggage, slipped through a generation gap, vanished.

The article also quotes the chair of the British Beer and Pub Association's property panel in saying, "If a village pub is sold off to build six new flats, the first people to complain about the lack of community facilities in the area are those that move into the new flats."

Hear hear.