Pubs in Great Britain

A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain,[1][2] Ireland,[3] Australia[4] and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom.[5] This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller villages no longer have a local pub.[6] In many places, especially in villages, a pub can be the focal point of the community. The writings of Samuel Pepys describe the pub as the heart of England.

The history of pubs can be traced back to Roman taverns,[7] through the Anglo-Saxon alehouse to the development of the modern tied house system in the 19th century.

Historically, public houses have been socially and culturally distinct from cafés, bars, bierkellers and brewpubs. Most public houses offer a range of beers, wines, spirits, and soft drinks. Many pubs are controlled by breweries, so cask ale or keg beer may be a better value than wines and spirits. Traditionally the windows of town pubs were of smoked or frosted glass to obscure the clientele from the street. In the last twenty years in the UK and other countries there has been a move towards clear glass, in keeping with with brighter interior décors.

The owner, tenant or manager (licensee) of a public house is properly known as the "pub landlord". The term publican (in historical Roman usage a public contractor or tax farmer) has come into use since Victorian times to designate the pub landlord. Known as a 'local' to regulars, pubs are typically chosen for their proximity to work, the availability of a particular beer, as a place to smoke (or avoid it), hosting a darts team, having a pool table, or appealing to friends. 

Until the 1970s most of the larger public houses also featured an off-sales counter or attached shop for the sales of beers, wines and spirits for home consumption. In the 1970s the newly built supermarkets and high street chain stores or off-licences undercut the pub prices to such a degree that within ten years all but a handful of pubs had closed their off-sale counters. A society with a particular interest in beers, stouts and ales in the British Isles, as well preserving the integrity of the UK public house, is the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).

History

Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans, Hertfordshire, which holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest pub in England

The inhabitants of Great Britain have been drinking ale since the Bronze Age, but it was with the arrival of the Romans and the establishment of the Roman road network that the first inns called tabernae,[7] in which the traveller could obtain refreshment, began to appear. After the departure of Roman authority and the fall of the Romano-British kingdoms, the Anglo-Saxons established alehouses that grew out of domestic dwellings. The Anglo-Saxon alewife would put a green bush up on a pole to let people know her brew was ready.[9] These alehouses formed meeting houses for the locals to meet and gossip and arrange mutual help within their communities. Here lie the beginnings of the modern pub. They became so commonplace that in 965 King Edgar decreed that there should be no more than one alehouse per village.

A traveller in the early Middle Ages could obtain overnight accommodation in monasteries, but later a demand for hostelries grew with the popularity of pilgrimages and travel. The Hostellers of London were granted guild status in 1446 and in 1514 the guild became the Worshipful Company of Innholders.[10]

Inns

"Inn" redirects here. For other uses, see Inn (disambiguation).

  A 19th century inn in Vălenii de Munte, Romania (currently in Village Museum, Bucharest) 

Inns are generally establishments or buildings where travellers can seek lodging and, usually, food and drink. They are typically located in the country or along a highway. Found in Europe, they possibly first sprang up when the Romans built their system of Roman roads two millennia ago. Some inns in Europe are several centuries old. In addition to providing for the needs of travellers, inns traditionally acted as community gathering places.

In Europe, it is the provision of accommodation, if anything, that now separates inns from taverns, alehouses and pubs. The latter tend to supply alcohol (and, in the UK, usually soft drinks and sometimes food), but less commonly accommodation. Inns tend to be grander and more long-lived establishments; historically they provided not only food and lodging, but also stabling and fodder for the traveller's horse(s) and fresh horses for the mail coach. Famous London examples of inns include the George and The Tabard. There is however no longer a formal distinction between an inn and other kinds of establishment. Many pubs use the name "inn", either because they are long established and may have been formerly coaching inns, or to summon up a particular kind of image, or in many cases simply as a pun on the word "in" such as "The Welcome Inn" the name of many pubs in Scotland.

The original functions of an inn are now usually split among separate establishments, such as hotels, lodges, and motels, all of which might provide the traditional functions of an inn but which focus more on lodging customers than on other services; public houses, which are primarily alcohol-serving establishments; and restaurants and taverns, which serve food and drink. (Hotels often contain restaurants and also often serve complimentary breakfast and meals, thus providing all of the functions of traditional inns.) In North America, the lodging aspect of the word "inn" lives on in hotel brand names like Holiday Inn, and in some state laws that refer to lodging operators as innkeepers. 

The Inns of Court in London were originally ordinary inns where barristers met to do business, but have become institutions of the legal profession in England and Wales.

Beer Houses and the 1830 Beer Act

Traditional English ale was made solely from fermented malt. The practice of adding hops to produce beer was introduced from the Netherlands in the early 15th century. Alehouses would each brew their own distinctive ale, but independent breweries began to appear in the late 17th century. By the end of the century almost all beer was brewed by commercial breweries.

The 18th century saw a huge growth in the number of drinking establishments, primarily due to the introduction of gin. Gin was brought to England by the Dutch after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and started to become very popular after the government created a market for grain that was unfit to be used in brewing by allowing unlicensed gin production, whilst imposing a heavy duty on all imported spirits. As thousands of gin-shops sprang up all over England, brewers fought back by increasing the number of alehouses. By 1740 the production of gin had increased to six times that of beer and because of its cheapness it became popular with the poor, leading to the so-called Gin Craze. Over half of the 15,000 drinking establishments in London were gin-shops.

The drunkenness and lawlessness created by gin was seen to lead to ruination and degradation of the working classes. The distinction was illustrated by William Hogarth in his engravings Beer Street and Gin Lane.[11] The Gin Act (1736) imposed high taxes on retailers but led to riots in the streets. The prohibitive duty was gradually reduced and finally abolished in 1742. The 1751 Gin Act however was more successful. It forced distillers to sell only to licensed retailers and brought gin-shops under the jurisdiction of local magistrates. 

By the early 19th century and encouraged by a lowering of duties on gin, the gin houses or "Gin Palaces" had spread from London to most major cities and towns in Britain, with most of the new establishments illegal and unlicensed. These bawdy, loud and unruly drinking dens so often described by Charles Dickens in his Sketches by Boz (published 1835–6) increasingly came to be held as unbridled cesspits of immorality or crime and the source of much ill-health and alcoholism among the working classes.[

Under a banner of "reducing public drunkenness" the Beer Act of 1830 introduced a new lower tier of premises permitted to sell alcohol, the Beer Houses. At the time beer was viewed as harmless, nutritious and even healthy. Young children were often given what was described as small beer, which was brewed to have a low alcohol content, to drink, as the local water was often unsafe. Even the evangelical church and temperance movements of the day viewed the drinking of beer very much as a secondary evil and a normal accompaniment to a meal. The freely available beer was thus intended to wean the drinkers off the evils of gin, or so the thinking went.[13] 

Under the 1830 Act any householder who paid rates could apply, with a one-off payment of two guineas (equal to £158.64 today), to sell beer or cider in his home (usually the front parlour) and even brew his own on his premises. The permission did not extend to the sale of spirits and fortified wines and any beer house discovered selling those items was closed down and the owner heavily fined. Beer houses were not permitted to open on Sundays. The beer was usually served in jugs or dispensed directly from tapped wooden barrels lying on a table in the corner of the room. Often profits were so high the owners were able to buy the house next door to live in, turning every room in their former home into bars and lounges for customers. 

In the first year, four hundred beer houses opened and within eight years there were 46,000[14] opened across the country, far outnumbering the combined total of long-established taverns, public houses, inns and hotels. Because it was so easy to obtain permission and the profits could be huge compared to the low cost of gaining permission, the number of beer houses was continuing to rise and in some towns nearly every other house in a street could be a beer house. Finally in 1869 the growth had to be checked by magisterial control and new licensing laws were introduced. Only then was the ease by which permission could be obtained reduced and the licensing laws which operate today formulated. 

Although the new licensing laws prevented any new beer houses from being created, those already in existence were allowed to continue and many did not fully die out until nearly the end of the 19th century. A very small number remained into the 21st century.[15] A vast majority of the beer houses applied for the new licences and became full public houses. These usually small establishments can still be identified in many towns, seemingly oddly located in the middle of otherwise terraced housing part way up a street, unlike purpose-built pubs that are usually found on corners or road junctions. Many of today's respected real ale micro-brewers in the UK started as home based Beer House brewers under the 1830 Act. 

The beer houses also tended to avoid the traditional public house names like The Crown, The Red Lion, The Royal Oak etc. and, if they did not simply name their place Smith's Beer House, they would apply topical pub names in an effort to reflect the mood of the times.

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Licensing laws

Main article: Licensing laws of the United Kingdom

 

The interior of a typical English pub 

From the middle of the 19th century restrictions were placed on the opening hours of licensed premises in the UK. However licensing was gradually liberalised after the 1960s, until contested licensing applications became very rare, and the remaining administrative function was transferred to Local Authorities in 2005. 

The Wine and Beerhouse Act 1869 reintroduced the stricter controls of the previous century. The sale of beers, wines or spirits required a licence for the premises from the local magistrates. Further provisions regulated gaming, drunkenness, prostitution and undesirable conduct on licensed premises, enforceable by prosecution or more effectively by the landlord under threat of forfeiting his licence. Licences were only granted, transferred or renewed at special Licensing Sessions courts, and were limited to respectable individuals. Often these were ex-servicemen or ex-policemen; retiring to run a pub was popular amongst military officers at the end of their service. Licence conditions varied widely, according to local practice. They would specify permitted hours, which might require Sunday closing, or conversely permit all-night opening near a market. Typically they might require opening throughout the permitted hours, and the provision of food or lavatories. Once obtained, licences were jealously protected by the licensees (always persons expected to be generally present, not a remote owner or company), and even "Occasional Licences" to serve drinks at temporary premises such as fêtes would usually be granted only to existing licensees. Objections might be made by the police, rival landlords or anyone else on the grounds of infractions such as serving drunks, disorderly or dirty premises, or ignoring permitted hours. 

Detailed records were kept on licensing, giving the Public House, its address, owner, licensee and misdemeanours of the licensees for periods often going back for hundreds of years. Many of these records survive and can be viewed, for example, at the London Metropolitan Archives centre. 

These culminated in the Defence of the Realm Act[16] of August 1914, which, along with the introduction of rationing and the censorship of the press for wartime purposes, also restricted the opening hours of public houses to 12 noon–2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m. Opening for the full licensed hours was compulsory, and closing time was equally firmly enforced by the police; a landlord might lose his licence for infractions. There was a special case established under the State Management Scheme[17] where the brewery and licensed premises were bought and run by the state until 1973, most notably in the Carlisle District. During the 20th century elsewhere, both the licensing laws and enforcement were progressively relaxed, and there were differences between parishes; in the 1960s, at closing time in Kensington at 10:30 p.m., drinkers would rush over the parish boundary to be in good time for "Last Orders" in Knightsbridge before 11 p.m., a practice observed in many pubs adjoining licensing area boundaries. Some Scottish and Welsh parishes remained officially "dry" on Sundays (although often this merely required knocking at the back door of the pub). These restricted opening hours led to the tradition of lock-ins. 

However, closing times were increasingly disregarded in the country pubs. In England and Wales by 2000 pubs could legally open from 11 a.m. (12 noon on Sundays) through to 11 p.m. (10:30 p.m. on Sundays). That year was also the first to allow continuous opening for 36 hours from 11 a.m. on New Year's Eve to 11 p.m. on New Year's Day. In addition, many cities had by-laws to allow some pubs to extend opening hours to midnight or 1 a.m., whilst nightclubs had long been granted late licences to serve alcohol into the morning. Pubs in the immediate vicinity of London's Smithfield market, Billingsgate fish market and Covent Garden fruit and flower market were permitted to stay open 24 hours a day since Victorian era times to provide a service to the shift working employees of the markets. 

Scotland's and Northern Ireland's licensing laws have long been more flexible, allowing local authorities to set pub opening and closing times. In Scotland, this stemmed out of a late repeal of the wartime licensing laws, which stayed in force until 1976. 
 

The Licensing Act 2003,[18] which came into force on 24 November 2005, aimed to consolidate the many laws into a single act. This allowed pubs in England and Wales to apply to the local authority for the opening hours of their choice. Supporters at the time argued that it would end the concentration of violence around half past 11, when people had to leave the pub, making policing easier. In practice, alcohol-related hospital admissions rose following the change in the law, with alcohol involved in 207,800 admissions in 2006/7.[19] Critics claimed that these laws would lead to "24-hour drinking". By the time the law came into effect, 60,326 establishments had applied for longer hours and 1,121 had applied for a licence to sell alcohol 24 hours a day. However, nine months after the act, many pubs had not changed their hours, although there was a tendency for some to be open longer at the weekend but rarely beyond 1:00 a.m..

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Indoor smoking ban

 

Tobacco smoke in a pub 

In March 2006, a law was introduced to forbid smoking in all enclosed public places in Scotland. Wales followed suit in April 2007, with England introducing the ban in July 2007.[20] Pub landlords had raised concerns prior to the implementation of the law that a smoking ban would have a negative impact on sales.[21] After two years, the impact of the ban was mixed; some pubs suffered declining sales, while others developed their food sales.[22] The Wetherspoons pub chain reported in June 2009 that profits are at the top end of expectations;[23] however, Scottish & Newcastle's takeover by Carlsberg and Heineken was reported in January 2008 as partly the result of its weakness following falling sales due to the ban.[24]

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Lock-in 

A "lock-in" is when the owner of a public house allows a number of patrons to continue staying in the pub after the legal closing time, the idea being that once the doors are locked, it becomes a private party rather than a pub. Patrons may put money behind the bar before official closing time, and redeem their drinks during the lock-in so no drinks are technically sold after closing time. The origin of the lock-in in Britain was a reaction to changes in the licensing laws in England and Wales in 1915, which curtailed opening hours to stop factory workers from turning up drunk and harming the war effort. Since 1915 the licensing laws changed very little, leaving the United Kingdom with comparatively early closing times. The tradition of the lock-in therefore remained. Since the Licensing Act 2003 premises in England and Wales may apply to extend their opening hours beyond 11 p.m., allowing round-the-clock drinking and removing much of the need for lock-ins.[25] Since the smoking ban, some establishments have operated a lock-in during which the remaining patrons can illicitly smoke without repercussions.[citation needed]

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Pub architecture

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Saloon or lounge

 

The Eagle, City Road, Islington, London, September 2005

 

The Gate, a typical 20th century 'estate pub' on the Seacroft Estate in Leeds 

By the end of the 18th century a new room in the pub was established: the saloon. Beer establishments had always provided entertainment of some sort—singing, gaming or a sport. Balls Pond Road in Islington was named after an establishment run by a Mr. Ball that had a pond at the rear filled with ducks, where drinkers could, for a certain fee, go out and take a potshot at shooting the fowl. More common, however, was a card room or a billiards room. The saloon was a room where for an admission fee or a higher price of drinks, singing, dancing, drama or comedy was performed and drinks would be served at the table. From this came the popular music hall form of entertainment—a show consisting of a variety of acts. A most famous London saloon was the Grecian Saloon in The Eagle, City Road, which is still famous these days because of an English nursery rhyme: "Up and down the City Road / In and out The Eagle / That's the way the money goes / Pop goes the weasel."[26] The implication being that, having frequented the Eagle public house, the customer had spent all his money, and thus needed to 'pawn' his 'weasel' to get some more.[26] The exact definition of the 'weasel' is unclear but the two most likely definitions are: that a weasel is a flat iron used for finishing clothing; or that 'weasel' is rhyming slang for a coat (weasel and stoat).[27] 

A few pubs have stage performances such as serious drama, stand-up comedy, musical bands or striptease; however juke boxes and other forms of pre-recorded music have otherwise replaced the musical tradition of a piano and singing.

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Public bar 

By the 20th century, the saloon, or lounge bar, had settled into a middle-class room—carpets on the floor, cushions on the seats, and a penny or two on the prices, while the public bar, or tap room, remained working class with bare boards, sometimes with sawdust to absorb the spitting and spillages, hard bench seats, and cheap beer. 

Later, the public bars gradually improved until sometimes almost the only difference was in the prices, so that customers could choose between economy and exclusivity (or youth and age, or a jukebox or dartboard). During the blurring of the class divisions in the 1960s and 1970s, the distinction between the saloon and the public bar was often seen as archaic, and was frequently abolished, usually by the removal of the dividing wall or partition itself. While the names of saloon and public bar may still be seen on the doors of pubs, the prices (and often the standard of furnishings and decoration) are the same throughout the premises,[28] and many pubs now comprise one large room. However, the modern importance of dining in pubs encourages some establishments to maintain distinct rooms or areas, especially where the building has the right characteristics for this. Yet, in a few pubs there still remain rooms or seats that, by local custom, "belong" to particular customers.