I MADE my way across the arid plain of a Wetherspoon’s pub in Wimbledon to the bar and ordered a whisky mac. Presented with a whisky and lemonade, I turned to look for a seat — the place was the size of a small principality and at 5.30pm on a Thursday there wasn’t a single empty table. This, I thought, is why traditional pubs have been stripped, gutted and enlarged in the past 20 years. Price your drinks low enough and nobody cares where all the etched glass, snugs and billiard tables have gone.
English Heritage and the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) announced in 1998 that, of 60,000 pubs in Britain, only 200 or so have interiors that are original, and fewer than 4 per cent have any historical value. This resulted in 21 listings and upgrades, with the value of the interiors given special emphasis. It seems the more Yates’s and Wetherspoon’s barns that appear, the stronger the rearguard action to defend the “local” and treasure its interior.
Licensed to Sell, a newly published English Heritage book, flits across the country uncovering everything from localised pub games (push penny, found only in pubs in Stamford, Lincolnshire) to a rare Art Deco bar at the Test Match in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire.
The joy of the places has always been in the detail, ever since the first pub signs went up in the 16th century. Before then, ale houses looked much like any other house, while the bar didn’t appear until the late 18th century; a few rural pubs — such as the Red Lion in Ampney St Peter, Gloucestershire, survive with hand pumps attached to the wall. The classic boozer for most people would be Victorian, and divided into separate rooms by what the author of Licensed to Sell, Geoff Brandwood, calls “typical Victorian hierarchy” — the public bar was for labourers, the lounge bar for clerks, shopkeepers and skilled workers. Look at the etched glass on pub windows and there are myriad variations: the Black Horse in Preston and the Lord Palmerston, Northampton, both boast a “market room”; a “ladies only” room survives at the Mitre, Bayswater; the Seven Stars in Holborn has a “private counter”, most likely to make the regulars feel more wanted.
“No one is sure what a smoke room was,” Brandwood says. “Possibly it was aping the smoking room of a gentleman’s residence. The Holly Bush in Hampstead has a coffee room, maybe to seem as if it was a more refined establishment.”
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For the most part, though, Victorian pubs weren’t refined at all. What we now call gin palaces were all built after the fact — none of the late Georgian originals survive, but the name lingered on wherever there was a surplus of cut glass, mosaic flooring, bright lights and an an atmosphere of Christmassy bonhomie. Pubs such as the Philharmonic (with Art Nouveau flourishes) in Liverpool and in London, the Princess Louise, Holborn and the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane, where Marianne Faithfull once posed with languorous sensuality, are among the grandest and most beautiful. In the North, Victorian pubs often had waiter service, and bell pushes at tables are still common, even if they rarely work. The Camden Head in Islington was a rare London example. In fact, London was much more likely to have more enclosed spaces — check the tiny drinking boxes at the Barley Mow in Marylebone. Opaque glass “snob screens” at eye level were once a common sight in London pubs, giving the customers in the lounge bar privacy to conduct business discreetly — if the barman couldn’t see your faces, he couldn’t tell if your drinking partner was really your wife.
Darts and other games flourished in Victorian pubs. At the Moon Inn, Mordiford, Herefordshire, quoits is still played, while skittles — which can be traced back to the Middle Ages — led to alleys being built in rooms adjacent to the bar. Long-alley skittles survive in some Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire pubs, while a London variant exists at the Freemasons Arms, Hampstead.
The billiard room was the most ornate as it needed a skylight. Elaborate, stained-glass survivors include the Salisbury in Harringay and the Vines in Liverpool. Bar billiards, which obviously took up less space, didn’t arrive in Britain until the Thirties, around the time the great Joe Davis popularised snooker in pubs and billiards went into decline.
Beginning with the Edwardian recession, the 20th century ravaged pub culture, radically altering the way pubs were designed and perceived. By the Twenties the gin palace was seen as unspeakably vulgar.
“Brewer’s Tudor” was a conservative Twenties/Thirties style preserved at the Black Horse, Northfield, Birmingham (a suspiciously high number of these vast roadhouses seem to have burnt down in the past 20 years), while “publican’s rustic” (roughly textured wood, chunky seats, fake beams) was equally retrogressive.
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Both were presumably meant to have a civilising influence. After the First World War more women were seen in pubs — larger pubs now included gardens for children. At the same time deliberately spartan pubs, such as the back-street Hand and Heart in Peter- borough, recalled ancient alehouses in an accidental but more authentic way. A few Modernist pubs sneaked by the planners in the Derby area as the owner of Offilers Brewery was a fan of streamlined style.
The return to Victoriana and pub preservation had its unlikely roots at the Architectural Review. At the end of the Forties the editor, H. De Cronin-Hastings, was trawling London skips for Victorian pub fittings; by 1951 he had launched a competition for the Public House of Tomorrow, which resulted in a Festival of Britain exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A new generation of architect drinkers took up De Cronin-Hastings’s challenge. Benskins brewery employed the flamboyant Roderick Gradidge, with his pigtail and “English” kilt, who reintroduced screens and murals to pubs in the Sixties, sympathetically turning back-rooms into lounge areas not unlike the Victorian saloon bar. Much of his work has since been gutted but his library at the famous Old Bull and Bush on Hampstead Heath remains.
Still Gradidge and co-conspirators such as Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen were fighting a forlorn battle. When control of almost all pubs was wrested by the big six breweries in 1964, architectural individuality went too. Elain Harwood, of English Heritage, recalls an exception in Ray Wilson Smith. “His pubs were just weird. The Coach and Horses in Chiswick had a stream running by the bar. Really, his pubs were Pop Art. Camra thought they were too kitsch. They’ve all disappeared.”
In fact, it’s the postwar pub that seems most under threat, the estate pub of the Sixties with its clean lines and Double Diamond windows. “Every man jack of them is unlisted,” Brandwood explains, “and because many are on problem estates they are susceptible to change — the landlord has to keep up interest to keep the customers.” Brandwood points estate-pub hunters to the Charlie Butler in Mortlake.
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Awareness of pub history is growing, though. Brandwood foresees a return to compartmentalised pubs and says that the Government could do worse than encourage the return of the smoke room. Even waiter service has returned, at least to the Edgar Wallace in Aldwych.
And maybe the era of the airfield-size pub is passing. Wetherspoon has acknowledged that different towns have different pub tastes, and its plans for new pubs will be more individual. Maybe it could start by employing staff who know what a whisky mac is.