WHO WANTS TO BUILD A PUB?
The Public House as a Vehicle for Housing Development & Social Reform in England.
Pilot Thesis Joseph Ridealgh St. Edmund’s College A pilot thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the M.Phil. in Architectural and Urban Design 2021.
4996 words This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text.
Acknowledgements With thanks to my supervisor Minna Sunikka-Blank, and conversations with Nicholas Simcik Arese and Neal Shasore. And with thanks to design tutors Conrad Koslowsky and Ingrid Schroder.
Contents Introduction (3) 1.0 Public House, Private House (4) 2.0 The Carlisle Experiment (6) 3.0 Copying Carlisle (10) 4.0 A Place of Leisure (12) 5.0 Who Gets To Use The Pub? (14) 6.0 A Different State (16) 7.0 Property Tycoons (18) 8.0 Grim Reaper of Pubs (20) 9.0 Community Owned Pubs (22) Conclusion (26) Bibliography (30) List of Illustrations (31)
Introduction The public house, whilst public is name, has primarily been a private venture by speculative developers. Although pubs may appear to the populace as relics of Victorian splendour or quaint pastoralism, the most prolific time for pub building was in fact the mid 20th century (1945-85) 1, in tandem with the post-war transformation of Britain’s housing. Pub builders and the State alike worked to position public houses at strategic points of new residential developments, embedding social centres into the estates that replaced slum dwellings in cities such as Manchester. 2 Now, despite a renewed impetus to build housing, Britain’s pubs are in rapid decline, no longer seen as an important part of a new neighbourhood. Why now has housing development cut its ties with the provision of social space?
1 Emily Cole, ‘10 of England’s Best Post-War Pubs’, Heritage Calling: A Historic England Blog, 2018 <https:// heritagecalling.com/2018/05/18/10-of-englands-best-post-war-pubs/> [accessed 23 March 2021].
2 Karl Whitney, ‘“Never Drink in a Flat-Roofed Pub”: How the Old Joke Became a Reality’, The Guardian, 11 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian. com/cities/2017/jul/11/never-drink-flatroof-pub-manchester-estates> [accessed 23 March 2021].
1.0
PUBLIC HOUSE PRIVATE HOUSE Contemporary discourse conceives of a housing crisis in number of units and rarely in relation to its failing social infrastructure. The pub is no longer seen as a vehicle for housing development and its evolution as a typology is inhibited by nostalgia. Some architects even claim, ‘that no good pubs have been built in the last fifty years*.’ 3 The aim of this research is to understand the development of pubs and housing as one and the same, through investigating their close relationship over the last century, with a specific focus on the impact of state management.
4
It will demonstrate the social potential that pub reformation can offer, despite the industry’s dependence on commerce, and imagine what pub reformation today could look like. In order to understand the sociocultural history of pub development, I will frame this essay through the two main actors who finance and build pubs in Britain - the State and the Speculative Developer. I will seek to recognise who has the agency to build social spaces and how this impacts their design. Pubs are privately owned and fundamentally linked to the economy yet are still considered as a vital public asset in terms of social space. As Antonia
Layard argues, ‘public space is not property. Or better put, public space is not just property.’ 4 It may be helpful then to consider how the public house transcends its own ownership structure. This essay will unpick who was responsible for building England’s pubs and what their vested interests in the development were. By locating this study in Carlisle, I can track the ambition and legacy of the state management of pubs, the Carlisle Experiment, whilst foregrounding the design of an alternative vision for the proposed Garden Village to the south of the city. This counterproposal will once again place the public house at the heart of residential development. Pubs are part of the British imaginary and are a powerful physical symbol of our collective social philosophy. A litany of derelict pubs alludes to a merry time-gone-by, stolen by unscrupulous property developers. Whilst this is true to some extent, it must be acknowledged who built these ruinous pubs in the first place. In the mid-to-late Victorian period, for example, building pubs was a popular model of beginning residential developments for speculative builders.
* referring to the 1920’s-1970’s. 3 Christopher Hutt, The Death of the English Pub (London: Arrow Books, 1973).
Girouard, in Victorian Pubs, refers to a description of this mode of pub development in a Builder of February 1854. It states that: ‘On the pastures lately set out for building you may see a double line of trenches with excavation either side…and a tavern of imposing elevation standing alone and quite complete, waiting the approaching rows of houses.’ (…) ‘At a distance of 200 paces in every direction they glitter in sham splendour…. the object of erecting them is to obtain a larger sum than the builder can acquire for any other species of property’. 5 These pubs would go up first to fund the housing that followed and worked as a ‘combined site office and canteen’ 6 for the construction workers. Developers cared little for the pub on social grounds and often closed pubs if further profit could be made elsewhere. In this way, housing developments and the public house are intrinsically linked and in turn, the pub reformation movement saw that, ‘better housing and improved pubs came to be perceived as inseparable, complementary reforms.’ 7
4 Antonia Layard, ‘Public Space: Property, Lines, Interruptions’, Journal of Law, Property and Society, 2 (1) (2016), 1–47. 5 Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (London: Studio Vista, 1975).
6
Girouard.
7 David W. Gutzke, Pubs and Progressives: Reinventing the Public House in England, 1896-1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).
2.0
THE CARLISLE EXPERIMENT In 1918, the State, under the Central Control Board nationalised all of the pubs in Carlisle and the surrounding area (Figure 2). Dubbed the ‘Carlisle Experiment’, what began as an intervention to control unruly drinking around munitions factories became a far greater progressive campaign to transform England’s social space. The project, under the influence of the Temperance movement, set about reforming the public house from the Victorian ‘gin palaces’ of alcohol consumption, to what was deemed a more inclusive and proper venue of leisure, a model that was then copied by breweries across the whole country. 6
The Carlisle Experiment was born from the construction of the vast H.M. Factory in Gretna, stretching 9 miles and operated by over 12,000 predominantly female workers 8. Such a large influx of people meant that housing needed to be built quickly and two temporary ‘wooden townships’ at Gretna and Eastriggs gave way to permanent housing (Figure 1) designed by the Garden City architect Raymond Unwin. Unwin saw this as an opportunity to build generous workers housing and to consolidate the improvement of living conditions through the Garden City movement.
Figure 1 - New housing replacing wooden township in Gretna.
In Homes for Heroes, Swenarton argues that ‘it was not only on questions of architecture that Gretna, Well Hall and other schemes were seen as potential prototypes for any future state housing.’ 9 The workers, dropped into brand new state housing in rural Cumbria, resorted to commuting into Carlisle to spend their pay packets in the city. Carlisle’s population was only around 50,000 at the time, so the pubs in Carlisle became considerably busier and tales of drunkenness inevitably proliferated. One account tells that ‘At Boustead’s, a watering hole near Carlisle station, they would line up 500 whiskies along the bar, ready for the first after-work customers off the train.’ 10
Figure 1 Gretna Township, Clayton Greens in Sarah Harper, The Gretna Bombing: When War Came to Gretna 7th April 1942 (The Devil’s Porridge Museum: Eastriggs and Gretna Heritage Group (SCIO), 2018).
This proto-antisocial behaviour together with a fear of low productivity in the munitions factory permitted the State’s takeover and reformation of all the pubs and breweries in the area. At this point the State controlled the housing, the factory, the pubs and the breweries, a heightened nationalisation that certainly heralded the rise of the welfare state decades later. The pubs under the State Management Scheme saw substantial reformation into what they called ‘Improved pubs’ and ‘New Model Inns’ 11. These new types of establishment were built to the design of the State’s newly appointed pub architect, Harry Redfern. Improvements included the removal of snugs and back alley entrances to create an open plan, surveyable, public bar. The introduction of more sober ‘counterattractions’ 12 such as cafes and games rooms aimed to introduce a new clientele to the pub who previously found it to be too intimidating or disreputable.
8 Christopher Brader, ‘Timbertown Girls: Gretna Female Munitions Workers in World War I’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2001). 9 Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981).
10 Phil Mellows, ‘Nationalize the Pubs’, Jacobin, 21 October 2017 <https:// jacobinmag.com/2017/10/pubs-drinking-nationalization-state-ownership>. 11 Emily Cole, The Urban and Suburban Public House in Inter-War England, 1918-1939, Research Report Series (Historic England, 2015). 12
Gutzke.
Figure 2 - State managed pubs in the Carlisle area. Carlisle in grey.
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Figure 2 Joseph Ridealgh, Map of public houses acquired or built by the State Management Scheme between 1916 and 1973 in the Carlisle and Gretna Districts, 2021, based on data plotted by Petra Wade in Clare Howard, Countering the ‘Deadliest of Foes’: Public Houses of the Central Control Board and the State Management Scheme, 1916-73, Research Report Series (Historic England, 2018).
These extensive amenity offerings meant that pubs and their gardens were open and busy all through the day, with women, children and the middle classes moving in to claim their piece of the pub. This detachment from the commercial world could be visualised in the removal of advertisements from the front of pub facades (Figures 3, 4). This gave pubs a new sense of institutional professionalism which deliberately cut ties with the celebratory drinking culture.
The intention of this change was to remove the incentive to make profit from flogging beers to already inebriated patrons. This could be seen as the absolute demarketisation of the space, allowing the pubs to function in a social capacity without viewing its users as customers. Yet this heightened authority and surveillance enabled the State to enact what Foucault might call biopolitical control. 14
Whilst there were more visible spatial changes, one of the most significant reforms to the pub was a new type of management style. The introduction of the Gothenburg model of ‘disinterested management’ 13 changed pub landlords into salaried civil servants.
Figure 3 - The Golden Lion pre-reformation. 13
Gutzke.
14 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, ed. by Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell, Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France, Paperback edition (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Figure 4 -The Golden Lion stripped of advertising.
Figure 3 Cumbria Image Bank, The Golden Lion, Botchergate, façade before state management. <https://historicengland.org.uk/research/current/discover-and-understand/military/the-firstworld-war/first-world-war-home-front/ what-we-already-know/land/state-control-of-pubs/> [accessed 23 March 2021]
Figure 4 Cumbria Image Bank, The Golden Lion, Botchergate, façade after state management. <https://historicengland. org.uk/research/current/discover-and-understand/military/the-first-world-war/ first-world-war-home-front/what-we-already-know/land/state-control-of-pubs/> [accessed 23 March 2021]
3.0
COPYING CARLISLE As the state-managed pubs became more popular, the spatial rearrangements began to be mimicked by the breweries who largely controlled the remaining pub stock of the country. Brewers and their architects would pilgrimage up to Carlisle to see the uninhibited potential of the pub. The New Model Inns hence served to upgrade the facilities of the private sector as well, with many built to imitate Redfern’s designs. Breweries were creating huge amounts of social infrastructure and encouraging pubs to be considered as places beyond alcohol consumption. For example:
10
‘On a vast working-class housing estate in suburban Leeds, Indcoope’s Middleton Arms typified the metamorphosis from gin palace into reformed pub occurring across the country. “It looked more like a beautiful public hall than a public house,” grudgingly admitted one advocate of state control. Three tennis courts, a spacious café, and a capacious hall, with “similar dimensions, furnishings, etc., to what is the general rule in modern first-class hotels,”. 15 Yet, as Pilcher describes, not all of the imitations were effective. He calls the improvements ‘part of a sales campaign by the breweries’ and that those improvements to
Figure 5 - Axonometric studies of some of Harry Redfern’s Carlisle pubs.
back gardens that ‘often substitute for a grass plot the flagging, fountains and floodlighting beloved of the present generation of “improvers,” contribute little to the value of the public house as a social centre.’ 16 This he contrasts with the ‘genuine standards of improvement’ made by the Carlisle Experiment, that ‘have provided many useful standards for subsequent efforts to make the public house serve more fully its purpose as a local social centre.’ The pub improvement movement not only served to raise the standards of private public houses but saw aspirations by patrons to improve the private home. Basil Oliver notes
comments from a Commissioners report of 1931 that suggest ‘the amenities provided in the public houses in Carlisle have created or stimulated a demand amongst the consumers for better conditions in their homes’.17 Here we see how closely that pubs and housing are intertwined. Yet it is unclear who specifically was steering these alterations, were the reformed pubs purely a product of the State’s ideology or of the pub architects’ personal agendas?
15 Gutzke. 16 Donald Pilcher, ‘Leisure as an Architectural Problem’, Architectural Review, December 1938. 17 Basil Oliver, The Renaissance of the English Public House (Faber & Faber, 1947). Figure 5 Joseph Ridealgh, Axonometric studies of Redfern pubs, 2021.
4.0
A PLACE OF LEISURE ‘The new breed of pub was, truly, the centre of the community, providing facilities for alcoholic consumption but also other refreshment, music, dancing, meetings, games and socialising. Pubs were used for wedding receptions, birthday parties, club, Masonic and religious meetings, bowls, darts and other sporting competitions, and social dances’. 18 This description of the sumptuous breadth of communal activities evokes Lefebvrian ideas of the rural fete 19 and illustrates the pub as the convivial centre of a kind of village life. This diversification of the pub to become a centralised venue 12
for leisure became emblematic of the State’s vision of what a more collectivist social space could be. The model was first tested in Gracie’s Banking, Annan just north of the border, where a new timber pub was built to host the influx of Gretna munitions workers. In addition to its beer hall and restaurant, Gracie’s Banking featured a cinema (Figure 6), a bowling green, putting greens and a quoits pitch. 20 These experimental new hybrid typologies proved the importance of providing social space in new housing developments and the sobering-up of the public house made the model far more palatable to the tee-total Garden City planners.
Figure 6 - The picture theatre at Gracie’s Banking, Annan.
‘On rapidly expanding LCC housing estates, where working-class residents searched often vainly for inexpensive organized leisure, brewers played an especially critical role in introducing upscale facilities. The sprawling Robin Hood, equipped with an enormous concert hall, a tearoom, and a clubroom, could accommodate several hundred residents of the Becontree Estate.’(…) ‘This achievement in promoting “community facilities” persuaded directors of the Welwyn Garden City in 1932 to authorize Whitbread & Company to build the Cherry Tree, the first such pub run by a commercial brewery on the hallowed ground of the garden cities.’ 21
Figure 7 - The garden of the Robin Hood on the Becontree estate.
18 Cole, The Urban and Suburban Public House in Inter-War England, 1918-1939. 19 Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à La Ville, 1996. 20 Oliver. 21 Gutzke. Figure 6 RIBA Collections, Gracie’s Banking, Annan: the picture theatre (1916) <https://www.architecture.com/image-library/RIBApix/image-information/ poster/gracies-banking-annan-the-picture-theatre/ posterid/RIBA60229.html> [accessed 23 March 2021]. Figure 7 6.12 A photograph published in The House of Whitbread in 1930 showing the main garden area of the Robin Hood pub in Becontree, London. in Cole, The Urban and Suburban Public House in Inter-War England, 1918-1939.
5.0
WHO GETS TO USE THE PUB? The Carlisle Experiment was seen by its advocates to be a progressive move towards inclusivity. The introduction of women and children to the pub suggested a broadening of who the pub is for. Indeed, it makes sense that the new model of pub would cater more so to women, considering they formed the largest portion of the interwar factory workforce. Improved pubs such as The Pheasant included a working girls café (Figure 8) on the top floor which offered women affordable meals in a social environment. Basil Oliver called this ‘a great boon in the neighbourhood, more especially to factory girls.’ 22 Improvements 14
Figure 8 - The working girls cafe at The Pheasant, Carlisle.
often bound specific social groups to specific public houses, so that Carlisle’s first state-managed pub, the Gretna Tavern, was catering for its namesake’s factory seems entirely logical. Whilst inclusive to some, Gutzke views these changes in a more
cynical light, suggesting that the socalled ‘improved pubs’ had merely imported middle class values into a space that had once provided sanctuary for working class men. He protests that ‘No one entering these state-nationalized pubs could possibly miss their projection of solid middle-class values’. 23 In improving the conditions of the pub, the State risked alienating its core patrons. Although the reformations under the scheme had progressive social intentions, the move to include this new demographic merely propagated the State’s ideal of the nuclear family unit. The divided plans of the Apple Tree (Figure 9) show how the architecture enforced the separation of male, female, 1st and 2nd class citizens. Tom Wilkinson notes that ‘Though often idealised as a zone of egalitarian conviviality, pubs have not really been heterotopian – indeed, they replicate the divisions of British society with ludicrous fidelity.’ 24 In this mirroring and perpetuating of traditional family values and class divisions, the State was effectively moralising a previously unpoliced space. As there has been no real reformation of the pub since this period, the pub could still be seen to enforce these biases both spatially and through the vehicle of nostalgia. 22 Oliver. 23 Gutzke. 24 Tom Wilkinson, ‘Typology: Pub’, Architectural Review, 15 September 2016 <https://www.architectural-review. com/essays/typology/typology-pub>. 25 Gutzke.
Figure 9 - Divisions in The Apple Tree, Carlisle.
What underlying bias might steer a contemporary pub reform? Yet the emergent typology was spatially diverse and served all kinds of leisure pursuits, for a significantly broader portion of the population. Gutzke even admits that ‘Of all the transplanted bourgeois amenities, the garden resonated most strongly with working-class families, becoming a defining characteristic of interwar improved pubs.’ 25 Whilst the wider implication of exclusion comes with this gentrification of the public house, this must be balanced with the ambition of a public house that is as accessible as a public park.
Figure 8 Figure 19: The working girls’ café on the first floor of the Pheasant, Church Street, Carlisle, circa 1917 in Clare Howard.
Figure 9 Plan 7a. The Apple Tree, Lowther Street, Carlisle in Basil Oliver, The Renaissance of the English Public House.
6.0
A DIFFERENT STATE Such was the success of the scheme that the pubs remained under state control well past the proposed wartime duration and into the 1970’s. The state-managed pubs of Carlisle resisted the rise of the big six breweries and marketisation of the industry only to be finally sold off by the Conservative administration. Reginald Maudling, the Conservative Home Secretary dealt the final blow claiming that, “…there is no longer sufficient, social or economic justification for the continuance of State Management of the liquor trade.” 26
16
Contrary to Maudling’s claim, the State Management Scheme consistently brought in profit. Contemporary critics see this ‘coded reference to a lack of social justification’ as purely a way ‘to reverse the process of collectivism which was an anathema to the new political right.’ 27 Indeed, it is unsurprising that a government such as this would return a public asset to private control. The Carlisle Experiment could also be viewed as part of the progressive movement to centralise all parts of public life. Specifically, the ‘fewer and better’ policy forced the closure of about 1/3 of public houses in order to invest in those that remained
open. This centralisation and control of England’s social space predates the State’s ambition to centralise leisure and social facilities into institutions like the community centre. As Gutzke puts it, ‘Carlisle, an experimental laboratory and microcosm of the entire industry, provided a tested blueprint for postwar reconstruction.’ 28 The decisive reformation of both pubs and housing become methods of social engineering that undoubtedly mirror the political intent of the party in power. Conversely, the system which exists today of absolute control by the private sector becomes devoid of any ideological vision beyond financial gain.
26 House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (19th January 1971, issue 844, pp. 272-273) (London: Hansard)
27 Carlisle City Centre Business Group, ‘The State Management Story’, The State Management Story <https://thestatemanagementstory.org/the-history/?> [accessed 23 March 2021]. 28
Gutzke.
7.0
PROPERTY TYCOONS Whilst the State Management Scheme remained in Carlisle until the 1970’s, in the background six large breweries began to dominate and control the country’s remaining public houses. Christopher Hutt tracks the fall in quality of beer and atmosphere in the English pub under the direction of breweries newly employed ‘marketing men’ and ‘the accountants, who view their companies’ pubs as good objects for the application of their property development mentality’ 29. What Hutt reads in the fall of beer quality was actually part of a much larger re-marketisation of England’s social space. A returning of the pub to the 18
speculative developer, but this time to far more powerful companies. Thatcher’s administration, wise to a market dominated by six breweries, introduced new caps on pub ownership to encourage more competition. Ironically, this move by the monopolies commission merely transferred large market shares to newly created pub companies or ‘PubCos’, further consolidating the re-marketisation of the pub. In this case, Snowdon bows to Hutt’s cynical prediction of an industry turned over to ‘property tycoons’.30 The PubCos see each pub as a unit in a wider property portfolio and thus when one pub seems to be less profitable than another it is closed.
Figure 10 - Ownership of UK public houses (in thousands), 1990 to 2018.
Pub closures should not be considered as the fall of a British institution, rather a returning of it to the hands of the speculative builder. We must remind ourselves of the way that developers in Victorian England would systematically build and close pubs as a device for unlocking land and generating profit. Girouard notes that ‘a builder who built a pub and installed himself as the licensee usually sold it after a year or two, or even sooner, either to another publican, or, less often, to a brewery.’ 31 Yet the developers of the early 21th century have no desire to keep building pubs, rather the opposite. Housebuilding developers will only include community facilities such as pubs on new build housing
estates when forced to do so through obligations such as Section 106 agreements. Evidently pubs are no longer a necessary part of profitable housing development.
29 30 31
Hutt. Hutt. Girouard.
Figure 10 BBPA 2019 Table E5 in Niamh Foley, Pub Statistics (House of Commons Library, 28 May 2020).
8.0
GRIM REAPER OF PUBS England’s pubs have been closing steadily since the late nineteenth century and the ‘UK has lost 21,000 pubs since 1980. Half of these closures have taken place since 2006.’ 32 It is obvious from the number of closures in recent years that the financial crash has had a significant impact on the industry. Yet the issue has come under little scrutiny, with closures often viewed through an economist’s lens and attributed to inevitable changes in consumer habits. Whilst these rapid closures are blamed on a number of consumer-oriented and legislative factors such as the smoking ban, liquor licenses and the rise of cheap 20
supermarket beer 33, the decline of the pub is largely down to pub development’s close dependency on the housing market. Developers pursue a model of ‘highest and best use’ in order to maximise profit on each site, and many developers have paid particular interest to pubs abandoned derelict by PubCos after the financial crash. ‘The Campaign For Real Ale (CAMRA) estimated in 2008 that a third of all shuttered pubs were converted into secondary businesses. Another third became residential properties. The final third were demolished.’ 34
Tom Lamont, in his piece in the Guardian, exposes the business of individual pub developers, which he terms ‘Grim Reaper(s) of pubs’ 35, buying failed pubs with the intention of building flats or converting into supermarkets. This is the fate of many public houses, amongst them the Rose and Crown in Upperby, Carlisle, built to Harry Redfern’s design as part of the Carlisle Experiment. The pub was built as a precursor to, and gradually enveloped by, a newly expanding suburb of Carlisle, which it served until it was closed, demolished and converted into 6 rather tight semi-detached houses by Cumbrian Properties Ltd in 2013. When such substantial profit can be made through this process it is no surprise that England’s pubs are now being flogged as flats.
Figure 11 - Rose and Crown, Upperby on completion.
Figure 12 - Rose and Crown, Upperby, derelict in 2008.
Figure 13 - The former Rose and Crown, now housing.
Figure 11 Fig 5 - The Rose and Crown, Upperby, Near Carlisle in Basil Oliver, ‘English Inns’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1932, 545–67.
32 Christopher Snowdon, CLOSING TIME: Who’s Killing the British Pub? (London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014). 33 Snowdon.
34 Tom Lamont, ‘The Death and Life of the Great British Pub’, The Guardian (London, 13 October 2015) <https://www. theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/ the-death-and-life-of-a-great-britishpub>. 35 Lamont.
Figure 12 Rose and Trev Clough, The Rose & Crown, Upperby (March 2008) <geograph.org.uk/p/6006324> [accessed 23 March 2021] Figure 13 Google Maps (Image capture: Jul 2018) < https://goo.gl/maps/j8Z5GSa1YpPjKxWJ9> [accessed 23 March 2021]
9.0
COMMUNITY OWNED PUBS The duality of the pub as both a social space and a commercial venture has led to a perpetual yoyoing of the pub from the hands of the State to the hands of the developer. To remove the pub from the control of both could allow the typology to be unlocked as a truly public space. There is a growing movement of communities buying and reclaiming the derelict pubs in their areas to save their local pubs from developer ‘Grim Reapers’. Community ownership allows pubs to consider the needs of a diverse range of shareholders in order to accommodate a larger portion of the community in its activities.
22
Renovations often introduce additional uses such as cafes, libraries, gardens and theatres, supported by charities such as the Prince Charles backed ‘Pub is the Hub’ who acknowledge the vital social role that the pub plays in rural and suburban neighbourhoods. There are obvious parallels to be drawn here between these additions and those of the State Management Scheme a century previous. CAMRA keep track of all the community owned pubs being set up in England, which at time of writing total 147 36. One such pub to pay particular attention to is The Bevy, Brighton, which claims to be the only community owned pub on a working-
class housing estate in England. With the aim of reopening a derelict 1930’s pub, The Bevendene Hotel, as a neighbourhood social space, the founders of the campaign marched door to door to gain support of locals and recruited over 660 shareholders in the process 37. Despite struggling to find funds, with a number of successful grant applications the Bevy found enough money to renovate and reopen, offering a range of facilities and events with the ambition of truly serving the community it sits within. The Bevy also proves that the community pub can function effectively outside of wealthy rural villages where they are more common. The community owned pub is now even being advocated and financed by the State, with the 2021 budget including a £150m community ownership fund 38. This could be an opportunity for a 21st century pub reformation, much like the Carlisle Experiment, but this time with the public setting the agenda. A diverse range of voices is surely the most egalitarian evolution of a pub that serves the public. Much like the State Management Scheme, the community owned pub ensures that profits stay in the local community and each shareholder
36 CAMRA, ‘Community Owned Pubs’ <https://tinyurl.com/CAMRACommunityOwnedPubs> [accessed 23 March 2021].
Figure 14 - The Bevendene Hotel.
Figure 15 - The derelict pub being cleared by volunteers,
Figure 16 - The opening of The Bevy in 2014.
37 Homegrown Films, The Bevy: Blood, Sweat and Beers (Brighton, UK: Homegrown Films, 2014) <https://vimeo. com/109565457> [accessed 23 March 2021]. 38 Jesse Norman, ‘BUDGET 2021 - PROTECTING THE JOBS AND LIVELIHOODS OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE’, HM Treasury, HC 1226, 2021, 110.
Figure 14 Bevendean History Group, Geoff & Norman Stevens pushing roller Bevendean hotel (1960) < http://www. bevendeanhistory.org.uk/estate/bevendean_hotel-1.html> [accessed 23 March 2021] Figure 15
Still from Homegrown Films.
Figure 16
Still from Homegrown Films.
(or taxpayer) has an incentive to spend money there. Despite its ties to government licensing laws, the community owned pub can set its own ideological agenda and choose what leisure and social facilities are the best fit for that particular community. Surveyable open plan spaces may once again give way to cosy snugs and nooks. If community owned pubs could become bound to cooperative housing movements, they could in turn be bound to, say, an independent brewery. A network of grassroots self-sustaining communities could emerge. Yet questions still remain. What should the new community pub look like? What are the leisure facilities needed today and who are they for? How can the public house once more embed itself within residential communities? And how might a more radical reprogramming of the pub create a more inclusive and socially valuable public space? The State Management Scheme not only serves to prove what significant changes can be made when the notion of competition is removed from the public house. But also provides a model of what absolute state control of work, housing and leisure would look like. This, at a time when Unwin and the Garden City movement were building selfsustaining communities such as Letchworth.39 Now, Carlisle prepares its new vision for a Garden Village, 24
the 2017 Conservative plan which takes all the nostalgia and none of the ideology from Ebenezer Howard’s movement. This perverse borrowing of the Garden City imaginary provides fertile ground for a study into the sustainable binding of housing, industry and social space, and how collective ownership of land can create longevity in communities. “The principles of collective land ownership, long-term stewardship and land value capture for the benefit of the community couldn’t be more relevant now,” said Katy Lock of the Town and Country Planning Association, which was originally founded in 1899 as Howard’s Garden City Association. “But it requires strong political leadership. Development in this country is led by short-term local politics and dominated by volume housebuilders, whereas garden cities don’t begin to pay back until 20 or 30 years later.” 40 Perhaps the State needs to step up and showcase what a truly self-sustaining community could look like.
39 Swenarton. 40 Oliver Wainwright, ‘The Garden City Movement: From Ebenezer to Ebbsfleet’, The Guardian, 2014 <https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ architecture-design-blog/2014/mar/17/ ebbsfleet-garden-city-george-osborne> [accessed 23 March 2021].
Figure 17 - Locations of community owned pubs in England and Wales.
Figure 17 Joseph Ridealgh, Map of community owned public houses in England and Wales, 2021, based on data from CAMRA, ‘Community Owned Pubs’.
Conclusion This essay aimed to shed some light on which actors have controlled how and where England’s public houses have been built. It saw the pub as the vehicle for the production and improvement of housing and a means to enact progressive social movements. The Carlisle Experiment shows how detaching the public house from the market can allow the development of a more inclusive type of social space and that a small and uninhibited case study can have a profound impact on an entire industry. By understanding the pub not only as a public space but as a speculative development model we can begin to understand why pubs are closing today, not only due to consumer habits, but because a pub is not the most profitable use of land. The rise of the community owned pub calls this into question and suggests that developers have underestimated the value of integrating pubs and housing. The new model inn of today can question the inclusivity of the existing pub model and experiment with new modes of opening the pub to the public. The next stage of my research will explore what the contemporary reformation of the pub could be, and for whom it is for. Through visiting and interviewing the people who have founded and frequent the community owned pubs in England, I will seek to understand how ownership structures effect use, what new facilities and activities have been introduced as a consequence, and the proximity of shareholders to each pub. By seeing the day-to-day use of these public houses, I hope to recognise what new types of architectural intervention are necessary to facilitate the transformation of the pub as a social space.
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As more pubs inevitably close as a result of losses due to the Covid-19 pandemic, decisive action must be taken to rescue the remnants of pubs from conversion by developers. The government is clearly wise to the need for an increase in the number of community owned pubs and social architects should take this as an opportunity to help residents reform their local into a resilient and inclusive public social space. Tom Whyman invites readers to ‘imagine a post-Covid settlement in which public space has been reclaimed through the power of recreational assembly: a world in which there is not only some small set of enclosed spaces where one might feel at home, but where it is possible for anyone to feel at home, anywhere in the world... The pub unfolded into everything.’ 41
41 Tom Whyman, ‘The Mask and the Queue’, Tribune, 13 August 2020 <https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/themask-and-the-queue>.
Brader, Christopher, ‘Timbertown Girls: Gretna Female Munitions Workers in World War I’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2001) CAMRA, ‘Community Owned Pubs’ <https://tinyurl.com/
Figure 18 - Proposal of new neighbourhood wards defined by a central community owned pub.
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Figure 18 Joseph Ridealgh, Carlisle Garden Village counterproposal - Pub Wards, 2021.
Figure 19 - Proposal of housing building out from a central pub.
Figure 19 Joseph Ridealgh, Carlisle Garden Village counterproposal axonometric view of central pub in context, 2021.
Bibliography Brader, Christopher, ‘Timbertown Girls: Gretna Female Munitions Workers in World War I’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2001) CAMRA, ‘Community Owned Pubs’ <https://tinyurl.com/CAMRACommunityOwnedPubs> [accessed 23 March 2021] Carlisle City Centre Business Group, ‘The State Management Story’, The State Management Story <https://thestatemanagementstory.org/the-history/?> [accessed 23 March 2021] Cole, Emily, ‘10 of England’s Best Post-War Pubs’, Heritage Calling: A Historic England Blog, 2018 <https://heritagecalling.com/2018/05/18/10-of-englands-best-postwar-pubs/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=brand> [accessed 23 March 2021] ———, The Urban and Suburban Public House in Inter-War England, 1918-1939, Research Report Series (Historic England, 2015) Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, ed. by Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell, Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France, Paperback edition (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Girouard, Mark, Victorian Pubs (London: Studio Vista, 1975) Gutzke, David W., Pubs and Progressives: Reinventing the Public House in England, 1896-1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006) Homegrown Films, The Bevy: Blood, Sweat and Beers (Brighton, UK: Homegrown Films, 2014) <https://vimeo.com/109565457> [accessed 23 March 2021] Hutt, Christopher, The Death of the English Pub (London: Arrow Books, 1973) Lamont, Tom, ‘The Death and Life of the Great British Pub’, The Guardian (London, 13 October 2015) <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-deathand-life-of-a-great-british-pub> Layard, Antonia, ‘Public Space: Property, Lines, Interruptions’, Journal of Law, Property and Society, 2 (1) (2016), 1–47 Lefebvre, Henri, Le Droit à La Ville, 1996 Mellows, Phil, ‘Nationalize the Pubs’, Jacobin, 21 October 2017 <https://jacobinmag. com/2017/10/pubs-drinking-nationalization-state-ownership> Norman, Jesse, ‘BUDGET 2021 - PROTECTING THE JOBS AND LIVELIHOODS OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE’, HM Treasury, HC 1226, 2021, 110 Oliver, Basil, The Renaissance of the English Public House (Faber & Faber, 1947) Pilcher, Donald, ‘Leisure as an Architectural Problem’, Architectural Review, December 1938 Snowdon, Christopher, CLOSING TIME: Who’s Killing the British Pub? (London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014) Swenarton, Mark, Homes Fit for Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981) Wainwright, Oliver, ‘The Garden City Movement: From Ebenezer to Ebbsfleet’, The Guardian, 2014 <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/mar/17/ebbsfleet-garden-city-george-osborne> [accessed 23 March 2021] Whitney, Karl, ‘“Never Drink in a Flat-Roofed Pub”: How the Old Joke Became a Reality’, The Guardian, 11 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/11/ never-drink-flatroof-pub-manchester-estates> [accessed 23 March 2021] Whyman, Tom, ‘The Mask and the Queue’, Tribune, 13 August 2020 <https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/the-mask-and-the-queue> Wilkinson, Tom, ‘Typology: Pub’, Architectural Review, 15 September 2016 <https:// www.architectural-review.com/essays/typology/typology-pub>
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List of Illustrations Figure 14 Bevendean History Group, Geoff & Norman Stevens pushing roller Bevendean hotel (1960) [online] < http://www.bevendeanhistory.org.uk/estate/ bevendean_hotel-1.html> [accessed 23 March 2021]. Figure 10 BBPA 2019 Table E5 in Niamh Foley, Pub Statistics (House of Commons Library, 28 May 2020). Figure 12 Clough, Rose and Trev, The Rose & Crown, Upperby (March 2008) [online] <geograph.org.uk/p/6006324> [accessed 23 March 2021] Figure 3 Cumbria Image Bank, The Golden Lion, Botchergate, façade before state management. [online] <https://historicengland.org.uk/research/current/discoverand-understand/military/the-first-world-war/first-world-war-home-front/whatwe-already-know/land/state-control-of-pubs/> [accessed 23 March 2021] Figure 4 Cumbria Image Bank, The Golden Lion, Botchergate, façade after state management. [online] <https://historicengland.org.uk/research/current/discoverand-understand/military/the-first-world-war/first-world-war-home-front/whatwe-already-know/land/state-control-of-pubs/> [accessed 23 March 2021] Figure 8 Cumbria Image Bank, Figure 19: The working girls’ café on the first floor of the Pheasant, Church Street, Carlisle, circa 1917 (ct41190 © Cumbria Image Bank) in Howard. Figure 11 Fig 5 - The Rose and Crown, Upperby, Near Carlisle in Basil Oliver, ‘English Inns’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1932, 545–67. Figure 13 Google Maps (Image capture: Jul 2018) [online] < https://goo.gl/maps/ j8Z5GSa1YpPjKxWJ9> [accessed 23 March 2021] Figure 1 Gretna Township, Clayton Greens in Sarah Harper, The Gretna Bombing: When War Came to Gretna 7th April 1942 (The Devil’s Porridge Museum: Eastriggs and Gretna Heritage Group (SCIO), 2018). Figure 15 Homegrown Films, The Bevy: Blood, Sweat and Beers (Brighton, UK: Homegrown Films, 2014) [online] <https://vimeo.com/109565457> [accessed 23 March 2021]. Figure 16 Homegrown Films. Figure 9 Plan 7a. The Apple Tree, Lowther Street, Carlisle in Basil Oliver, The Renaissance of the English Public House (Faber & Faber, 1947). Figure 6 RIBA Collections, Gracie’s Banking, Annan: the picture theatre (1916) [online] <https://www.architecture.com/image-library/RIBApix/image-information/ poster/gracies-banking-annan-the-picture-theatre/posterid/RIBA60229.html> [accessed 23 March 2021]. Figure 2 Ridealgh, Joseph, Map of locations of all public houses acquired or built by the Central Control Board and State Management Scheme between 1916 and 1973 in the Carlisle and Gretna Districts, based on data plotted by Petra Wade in Clare Howard, Countering the ‘Deadliest of Foes’: Public Houses of the Central Control Board and the State Management Scheme, 1916-73, Research Report Series (Historic England, 2018). Figure 5
Ridealgh, Joseph, Axonometric studies of Redfern pubs, 2021.
Figure 17 Ridealgh, Joseph, Map of community owned public houses in England and Wales, 2021, based on data from CAMRA, ‘Community Owned Pubs’. Figure 18 Ridealgh, Joseph, Carlisle Garden Village counterproposal - Pub Wards, 2021. Figure 19 Ridealgh, Joseph, Carlisle Garden Village counterproposal - axonometric view of central pub in context, 2021. Figure 7 6.12 A photograph published in The House of Whitbread in 1930 showing the main garden area of the Robin Hood pub in Becontree, London in Cole, The Urban and Suburban Public House in Inter-War England, 1918-1939.
University of Cambridge March 2021.
