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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.
