What does the committee pubs officer do?

Sheffield CAMRA’s new Pubs Officers, Paul Crofts and Mark Boardley on the challenge of keeping track of Sheffield & District pubs. As you may know, Sheffield CAMRA has been looking for members to get more involved in its activities, and in particular for new committee members. In response to this both myself (Paul) and Mark independently offered to take on the role of Pubs Officer. (Disappointingly no one made any reference to buses – “wait ages for one and then two turn up at once” etc. We suspect that the chairman, as a Supertram employee, has placed an embargo on any transport -based jocularity!) This function has been neglected for the last couple of years and needs a fair bit of work bringing things up to date so it was decided that two heads would be better than one, and we would share the work. Our initial plan is to get the Whatpub website up to date. If you’re not familiar with Whatpub, we’d recommend having a look next time you’re on t’internet. It has lots of information on pubs across the country and is a great way of finding places to visit. You can do a basic search by entering a keyword such as an area or pub name, and then up to 36 different filters can be applied to narrow the list down to pubs that suit your requirements, whether that’s for food; parking; disabled access; dog-friendly pubs; proximity to public transport, etc. Sheffield & District has 586 pubs and a good proportion haven’t been surveyed for over 3 years, so obviously this might take a while. And this is where CAMRA members can help. When you’ re visiting pubs in the area, any information you pick up that you think may be relevant can be emailed to us at the addresses below and we will act on it immediately. Mark is handling the East of Sheffield, and I’ll handle the West, though you can email either of us and we’ll sort it out. As well as details on the beer choice and pub facilities, you can also send us photos. The pub frontage is the first thing we need, but a few internal photos can also be included. We have already started on the updates, but obviously we can act a lot faster if you help us find the major errors and out-of-date information on the site. There are over 1400 members in the Sheffield branch so if each person sent us an update on just 1 pub it would give us more than enough to start on. (Yes, we know. It would also give us quite a bit of duplication. Our maths isn’t that bad. Mark will do 45%, I’ll do 45%, we’ll pass 25% to the committee and the remaining 7% we’ll leave till next year!) We’ll need to verify the information sent in, but it will be a massive help in knowing where to start. So, in summary – Get to the Pub! And if your other half asks what your doing, tell ’em Paul and Mark said it was all right. Cheers! Paul Crofts – pubsofficer@sheffieldcamra.org.uk Mark Boardley – pubscampaigns@sheffieldcamra.org.uk