IN the words of Whitbread, closing the Starting Gate pub and restaurant was a "cold commercial" decision. It will certainly send a shiver down the spine of anyone who cares about York's social scene.

We have become used to the disappearance of once familiar licensed premises.

More than half of England's villages now have no pub. Working men's clubs, too, are vanishing fast.

The trend is usually blamed on changing social and drinking habits, which have left these businesses struggling, and often failing, to make a profit.

But the demise of the Starting Gate is something different. Whitbread accepts that it is a viable concern, but selling the site for housing will make more money for shareholders.

Here is a brutal lesson in market economics. The customers who have long supported the Starting Gate, those who have booked Christmas celebrations at the Tadcaster Road premises, and the staff who have loyally served there, are ultimately less important than Whitbread's faceless City shareholders.

What makes the news all the more worrying is its wider implications. It shows profitability is no longer enough to secure a pub or club's future. That places many more at risk.

Developers will be scouring York for other Starting Gates, Frog Halls and Gimcracks. Property prices are now so high that pub owners will find it difficult to turn down very lucrative offers.

We are in danger of forgetting that there is more to life than money. Pubs are there to make a profit, certainly; but they also exist to serve fundamental human needs: companionship, conversation, fun.

Unhappily, society now values hard cash above all of these. Locally-enforced planning laws are designed less to protect a neighbourhood's traditions and amenities, than to aid redevelopment.

With the loss of each community pub, our city becomes a little quieter and a little sadder. If we are not careful, in a few years' time we shall all find ourselves locked away at home, drinking a mournful toast to York's long-lost locals.

Updated: 12:26 Wednesday, October 30, 2002