3.0 Copying Carlisle

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: ‘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).