Too much drink has always been an issue for the English; arguably, it is our longest-running political problem. St Boniface complained about the English and their over-indulgence in ale to Cuthbert, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in about AD750. Good King Edgar, who attempted to regulate beer drinking from the common cup during the 960s, was only the first of our leaders to worry about the English getting falling-down drunk. As a problem, it shows no sign of abating. Scare stories about screaming girls with their frocks tucked in their knickers fighting in city gutters awash with vomit abound. Moderate drinking, always in danger in England, is again on the back foot.

Attempts to deal with binge drinking include shrinking the size of wine glasses, ending the never well-named happy hours, or introducing health warnings on alcohol. But nothing seems to have worked as well as the well-run community pub as a way of building moderation into the English way of drinking.

My uncle Tony has a favourite story about his brother, my father, set in the days when She Wears Red Feathers and a Huli Huli Skirt by Guy Mitchell was the big song in their local. The pub was called the Parrot, and it was (still is) next to the River Wey south of Guildford, Surrey.

At the time, the slight bespectacled figure of Sydney Wooderson was the unlikely world record-holder for the mile, and my father's hero. Wooderson (who died last year, aged 92) was one of Britain's greatest athletes. My father fancied himself a sportsman, and his bible was Sydney Wooderson's training manual. Syd declared that, as part of his training regime, he drank two pints of ale a day, “drawn from the wood”. My father especially liked the “drawn from the wood” bit, and resolved to follow this part of the regime at least. Every night, he would go to the Parrot, drink his two pints, and sing songs with his pals. Two pints was what they liked; in Austerity Britain, you might argue, two pints was all they could afford. The point wasn't to get falling-down drunk, but to enjoy old-fashioned things such as good companionship, good cheer.

Times Archive, 1971: The disappearing local pub

British pubs are, like the Royal Family, the Commons and the London policeman, among the most evocative symbols of our way of life

BACKGROUND

• Pubs cry into beer no one is drinking

• Britvic pub sales suffer as drinkers cut back

• Bell sounds for last orders at British pubs

• Make mine a pint: the summer's best beers and ciders

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My father's best pal was the landlady's son. On the night before her son was to be married, with my father as best man, the landlady gave my father a whisky, and then another; on top of his two pints.

“I've never seen a man so ill,” my uncle Tony tells me. “He was sick all down the Fair Isle sweater your nan had knitted him. He couldn't move from the lav that night. And he missed the wedding the next day...”

Two pints and two whiskies was enough to fell a fit young man of 21 in 1952, In 2008, most 21-year-olds could do that without blinking.

Unfortunately pubs are in inexorable decline. More than 1,400 closed last year and their sales are dropping. So why is binge drinking enjoying a renaissance over Wooderson's two well-taken pints of an evening? City-centre drinking might be one reason. As shopping moved to the edge of town in the 1980s, bars started to move in. Without them many town centres would be dead; the “night-time economy” at present comprises 4 per cent of GDP, and rising. Bingeing rings tills. Town-centre pubs are divorced from the communities that controlled drinking; you go away from home, not to the end-of-street pub where your mum and dad have always taken a drink, so poor behaviour becomes easier. City centres used to be closed at night; why would people want to visit their banks or greengrocers in the dead of night? Now they are very much open. If city centres are to be reclaimed, new kinds of communal drinking need to be put in place; Edinburgh, for example, has said that it won't allow new licences for bars, but it will allow comedy clubs, where the point is something other than just getting falling-down drunk.

Students have always been associated with drinking; and there are a lot more of them than there were 20 or 30 years ago. The growth in student numbers has grown up alongside a sad decline in good old-fashioned campus feminism. The daughters of yesterday's feminist activists might think all that unshaven raven bit a lot of undigested hippy nonsense. Today's bluestockings want to go to the University of Hollyoaks to study marketing and beach volleyball, rather than Ancient Greek philosophy. The beardy student at the four-ale bar, quaffing pints of Camra-approved nut brown ale, is a thing of legend; so is his girlfriend, happy to drink a few pints with the blokes on folk-club night.

If todays's glamorous but drunk lad and laddette students were more interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, they could compare the cases of the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans. The Cyrenaics argued that there is no happiness distinct from short-term sensation. At the moment, city centres are given over to Cyrenaics. Today's binge drinkers have all had half a bottle of vodka at home while they put their make-up on. They are pished well before they hit the pubs. The aim is no longer good cheer, but oblivion. The Epicureans urged us to moderate our pleasures, though Epicurean pubs may seem a little far-fetched. We might have to wait a few years until our young people become less dull.

George Orwell presented a model of a perfect town-centre pub. He called it the Moon Under Water, with its motherly bar staff, friendly locals, liver sausage sandwiches and cheerful beer garden. It would be difficult to argue with it as a model for a nice way to spend the afternoon; difficult to imagine “the Moon” stuffed to the gills with screaming bingers.

We ignore the culture of our pubs at our peril. They are our last best hope for moderating drinking. We need the Sydney Woodersons to come back for their couple of pints with the motherly landlady and shame the bingers into Epicureanism.

Ian Marchant is the author of The Longest Crawl (Bloomsbury), a journey across Britain from pub to pub

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