All too soon came the answer to my question, recently posed here, concerning the future of The Shelley Arms in Cowley, boarded up and dilapidated as it had been for more than four years.

Within days of my column appearing, the place was reduced to rubble, and in short order. Passing on my bike one lunchtime, I saw half the building had gone overnight; by the next afternoon it had been completely flattened.

A pitiful pile of bricks was all that remained, being pushed into place by the bucket of a ravenous demolition machine, as my photograph shows.

The column and frame, which once held the pub sign, stood sentinel over the operation. A thin plume of smoke rose from a bonfire in the garden. Unrecyclable wood, one supposed.

Houses are now to fill the site, if my reading of the website detailing city council planning decisions is correct. But where will their occupiers go of a night?

Built in 1936, when so many fine pubs were being constructed across the city, the Shelley held a pivotal position in the community until a few years ago and was packed most nights of the week.

My occasional visits, as I mentioned before, were mainly made as a team member playing in the Oxford Mail quiz league.

While our little grey cells were being exercised in one room, others were given over to the rich variety of activity that once brightened pub life: bar billiards, darts, cribbage. Of course there was conversation, much of it ribald and joshing, as so often at a bar. Outside in summer might have been heard the unmistakable thwack of stick on doll that meant a game of Aunt Sally in progress.

How sad that all this has become a thing of the past. The folk who once enjoyed all these activities, and the human contact they brought, perhaps now spend their evenings staring at a screen, or in a bar where pounding music renders conversation impossible.

For a seasoned pub-goer such as I it still seems almost incredible that hostelries are vanishing in such vast numbers. They had seemed to possess in-built permanence.

True, there were occasional closures, usually concerned with what used to be called urban renewal; but these were rare indeed.

One I recall, not long after coming to work in Oxford in the early 1970s, was The Fountain in Great Clarendon Street which went as part of an expansion at Oxford University Press. The regulars’ sadness was diminished in small part by helping landlord Ted Simmons to drink the place dry.

This was a Morrell’s pub whose boss at the time, Col Bill Morrell, was adamant that his company’s entire estate should remain intact.

A first breach in this policy came, I recall, when the Colonel was prevailed upon to permit the closure of The Cross Keys, in South Hinksey, where Morrell’s had another pub in the shape of The General Eliott.

This, too, was eventually to shut as well, though it is now happily enjoying a renaissance under owners Cass and Helen Hazlewood, who have successfully reversed the trend in bringing a pub back into business. Food has naturally been playing a big part in this.

As for Morrell’s, the company has utterly ceased to exist, its St Thomas’s brewery transformed into up-market housing and the dwindling estate of pubs divided among many owners, principally Greene King. (Remember when this outfit was seen as the ‘saviour’ of the small breweries?) Charles Eld, the Colonel’s nephew and successor, resisted the sell-off but was defeated by rivals within the family.

He went on to set up the award-winning Far From the Madding Crowd, the name alluding to (besides the obvious Thomas Hardy novel) its out-of-the-way location in Oxford city centre.

Sadly, “Oxford’s youngest pub”, as he styled it, went out of business in January after 13 years, with rising rent a major factor in its demise.

A gleam of hope on the horizon concerning the nation’s pubs has come with the awarding of listed status to some of the best built between the wars.

In happier circumstances, the Shelley might have even been one of these.