4.0 A Place of Leisure

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 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.