Vale Life Magazine

I have recently agreed to write a regular column for Vale Life Magazine, on the pubs, breweries and beers of the Aylesbury Vale region.

Vale Life is a high-quality free local-interest magazine, published every six weeks covering culture, community and business in Aylesbury, Tring, Wendover, Thame, Princes Risborough and the surrounding villages. Its patch spreads across Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire. Each issue has a print run of 11,500 copies and a regular readership of over 35,000 across print and online. The magazine is stocked in a variety of business such as cafes, pubs, community centres, libraries, farm shops and other independent vendors. Online, it’s available to read on the Vale Life website here.

Living near Aylesbury, I have read Vale Life for a number of years and always look forward to picking up the latest issue. However, it was only recently that I realised it rarely features anything on the pubs and breweries of the area, beyond the occasional paid advertisements.

Our area is rich with fantastic pubs in a wide variety of styles and half a dozen excellent breweries supplying brilliant quality beers to the region. So, I reached out to the editor, Charlie and offered my services. I am pleased to share that the offer was accepted.

My first article, covering my local pub, The Oak in Aston Clinton, is featured in the latest issue (September/October issue, pictured) and I have agreed in principle to article topics for the next twelve months.

You would have to be living under a rock to not be aware of the horrendous battle pubs are up against to keep on trading. Eight pubs a week are closing permanently in England and thousands more are hanging on by their fingernails. They are overtaxed, over charged on utilities and stung by increasing costs on all fronts, plus more. If we want our pubs to survive and thrive we need to be supporting them at every opportunity. The same goes for independent breweries, of which we have lost around five hundred since the pandemic. Like most people, I can only commit a finite amount of time and money to actually going to the pub, so I try to find other ways to support them, and hopefully, in some small way, these articles can do that for the featured businesses. This isn’t a paid endeavour, this is done for the love of pub and beer culture.

I have agreed with the editor that I can reprint select articles from Vale Life here on my blog, a year or more after initial publication in the magazine, so expect to see them crop up in the future.

So, if you live in the region grab a copy, if you don’t live in the Vale, then read it online. You could read it at home, but it would be even better if you read it over a pint in the pub.