1.0 Public House, Private House

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. 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. 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.

6

Girouard.