5.0 Who Gets To Use The Pub?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.