9.0 Community Owned Pubs

COMMUNITY OWNED PUBS

The duality of the pub as both a social space and a commercial venture has led to a perpetual yoyoing of the pub from the hands of the State to the hands of the developer. To remove the pub from the control of both could allow the typology to be unlocked as a truly public space. There is a growing movement of communities buying and reclaiming the derelict pubs in their areas to save their local pubs from developer ‘Grim Reapers’. Community ownership allows pubs to consider the needs of a diverse range of shareholders in order to accommodate a larger portion of the community in its activities. Renovations often introduce additional uses such as cafes, libraries, gardens and theatres, supported by charities such as the Prince Charles backed ‘Pub is the Hub’ who acknowledge the vital social role that the pub plays in rural and suburban neighbourhoods. There are obvious parallels to be drawn here between these additions and those of the State Management Scheme a century previous.

CAMRA keep track of all the community owned pubs being set up in England, which at time of writing total 147 36. One such pub to pay particular attention to is The Bevy, Brighton, which claims to be the only community owned pub on a working-

class housing estate in England. With the aim of reopening a derelict 1930’s pub, The Bevendene Hotel, as a neighbourhood social space, the founders of the campaign marched door to door to gain support of locals and recruited over 660 shareholders in the process 37. Despite struggling to find funds, with a number of successful grant applications the Bevy found enough money to renovate and reopen, offering a range of facilities and events with the ambition of truly serving the community it sits within. The Bevy also proves that the community pub can function effectively outside of wealthy rural villages where they are more common.

The community owned pub is now even being advocated and financed by the State, with the 2021 budget including a £150m community ownership fund 38. This could be an opportunity for a 21st century pub reformation, much like the Carlisle Experiment, but this time with the public setting the agenda. A diverse range of voices is surely the most egalitarian evolution of a pub that serves the public. Much like the State Management Scheme, the community owned pub ensures that profits stay in the local community and each shareholder

Figure 14 - The Bevendene Hotel.

Figure 15 - The derelict pub being cleared by volunteers,

Figure 16 - The opening of The Bevy in 2014.

37 Homegrown Films, The Bevy: Blood, Sweat and Beers (Brighton, UK: Homegrown Films, 2014) <https://vimeo. com/109565457> [accessed 23 March 2021]. 38 Jesse Norman, ‘BUDGET 2021 - PROTECTING THE JOBS AND LIVELIHOODS OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE’, HM Treasury, HC 1226, 2021, 110. Figure 14 Bevendean History Group, Geoff & Norman Stevens pushing roller Bevendean hotel (1960) < http://www. bevendeanhistory.org.uk/estate/bevendean_hotel-1.html> [accessed 23 March 2021]

(or taxpayer) has an incentive to spend money there. Despite its ties to government licensing laws, the community owned pub can set its own ideological agenda and choose what leisure and social facilities are the best fit for that particular community. Surveyable open plan spaces may once again give way to cosy snugs and nooks. If community owned pubs could become bound to cooperative housing movements, they could in turn be bound to, say, an independent brewery. A network of grassroots self-sustaining communities could emerge.

Yet questions still remain. What should the new community pub look like? What are the leisure facilities needed today and who are they for? How can the public house once more embed itself within residential communities? And how might a more radical reprogramming of the pub create a more inclusive and socially valuable public space?

The State Management Scheme not only serves to prove what significant changes can be made when the notion of competition is removed from the public house. But also provides a model of what absolute state control of work, housing and leisure would look like. This, at a time when Unwin and the Garden City movement were building selfsustaining communities such as Letchworth.39 Now, Carlisle prepares its new vision for a Garden Village, the 2017 Conservative plan which takes all the nostalgia and none of the ideology from Ebenezer Howard’s movement. This perverse borrowing of the Garden City imaginary provides fertile ground for a study into the sustainable binding of housing, industry and social space, and how collective ownership of land can create longevity in communities.

“The principles of collective land ownership, long-term stewardship and land value capture for the benefit of the community couldn’t be more relevant now,” said Katy Lock of the Town and Country Planning Association, which was originally founded in 1899 as Howard’s Garden City Association. “But it requires strong political leadership. Development in this country is led by short-term local politics and dominated by volume housebuilders, whereas garden cities don’t begin to pay back until 20 or 30 years later.” 40 Perhaps the State needs to step up and showcase what a truly self-sustaining community could look like.

39

Swenarton. 40 Oliver Wainwright, ‘The Garden City Movement: From Ebenezer to Ebbsfleet’, The Guardian, 2014 <https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ architecture-design-blog/2014/mar/17/ ebbsfleet-garden-city-george-osborne> [accessed 23 March 2021].

Figure 17 - Locations of community owned pubs in England and Wales.

This essay aimed to shed some light on which actors have controlled how and where England’s public houses have been built. It saw the pub as the vehicle for the production and improvement of housing and a means to enact progressive social movements. The Carlisle Experiment shows how detaching the public house from the market can allow the development of a more inclusive type of social space and that a small and uninhibited case study can have a profound impact on an entire industry. By understanding the pub not only as a public space but as a speculative development model we can begin to understand why pubs are closing today, not only due to consumer habits, but because a pub is not the most profitable use of land. The rise of the community owned pub calls this into question and suggests that developers have underestimated the value of integrating pubs and housing. The new model inn of today can question the inclusivity of the existing pub model and experiment with new modes of opening the pub to the public.

The next stage of my research will explore what the contemporary reformation of the pub could be, and for whom it is for. Through visiting and interviewing the people who have founded and frequent the community owned pubs in England, I will seek to understand how ownership structures effect use, what new facilities and activities have been introduced as a consequence, and the proximity of shareholders to each pub. By seeing the day-to-day use of these public houses, I hope to recognise what new types of architectural intervention are necessary to facilitate the transformation of the pub as a social space.

As more pubs inevitably close as a result of losses due to the Covid-19 pandemic, decisive action must be taken to rescue the remnants of pubs from conversion by developers. The government is clearly wise to the need for an increase in the number of community owned pubs and social architects should take this as an opportunity to help residents reform their local into a resilient and inclusive public social space. Tom Whyman invites readers to ‘imagine a post-Covid settlement in which public space has been reclaimed through the power of recreational assembly: a world in which there is not only some small set of enclosed spaces where one might feel at home, but where it is possible for anyone to feel at home, anywhere in the world...

The pub unfolded into everything.’ 41

Brader, Christopher, ‘Timbertown Girls: Gretna Female Munitions Workers in World War I’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2001)

CAMRA, ‘Community Owned Pubs’ <https://tinyurl.com/

Figure 18 - Proposal of new neighbourhood wards defined by a central community owned pub.

Figure 19 - Proposal of housing building out from a central pub.