Comment by jimnotgym
1 month ago
One striking feature in the UK is the number of pubs that 'went on fire'.
The business is no longer viable, planning constraints (and often listed building constraints, which is protection for historical buildings, many pubs are very old) won't let them do anything else with the building so they sit empty until they spontaneously combust. Soon after they get demolished and regrow as a supermarket or apartments.
Worth noting the circle of "pubs that light on fire" and "flat roofed 1970s slum pub" almost entirely overlap. Nobodies setting fire to their thatched-roof pub from 1650 because of pub rates. They just change hands through the breweries every 3-4 years now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat-roofed_pub
https://news.sky.com/story/police-now-treating-fire-at-histo...
More profitable to convert the pub into a house and sell it that to actually run a pub.
Not quite that old, but plenty of historic pubs have gone on fire
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq87x44ey9po
This is the hidden tragedy of the "listed building" process. It's actually a sizeable burden on a property, because suddenly there's all these compliance requirements on how you do repairs and upkeep.
_Not_ doing repairs and upkeep is free.
Arson is very difficult to prove.
So the listing process preserves a building exactly as it is, sometimes for decades past its usefulness, until it collapses or burns down.