British view: British pubs are voluntarily banning smoking in the face of growing numbers of health-conscious drinkers and the threat of litigation.
Non-smoking areas within pubs and restaurants have become common in recent years, but now a small but growing number of venues are going one step further.
The anti-smoking lobby internationally is gaining momentum. New York City's decision in March to ban smoking in bars and restaurants, to be followed by the Republic in January, has sent a chill through many in the British pub trade. Conventional wisdom argues that infringing drinkers' right to have a puff with their pint would mean it was the profits that went up in flames.
The Morning Advertiser, the publicans' newspaper, sent a reporter to Manhattan earlier this summer to illustrate what it called the "nose-dive in takings" that followed the ban.
In Britain though, the handful of publicans who have forbidden smoking on their premises seem - for the moment - to be successful. They have found consumer demand, at least on a niche basis, for bars with clean air.
Yesterday Pizza Hut restaurants outlawed smoking, citing the need to protect both staff and customers from passive smoking.
Its announcement came after a casino worker last week received a £50,000 out-of-court settlement after he said he developed asthma through passive smoking at work. It was thought to be the first such payout in the leisure industry, prompting one union to warn that more litigation was in the pipeline.
The Ring O'Bells, in the Wirral, found that takings more than doubled after it banned smoking in June. The pub is owned by one of Britain's biggest bar operators, Laurel, which has said it is keen to do the same in other venues.
Mr Alan Jones, manager of the Ring O'Bells, said some regulars who were smokers had stopped coming, "but we have gained an awful lot of non-smokers".