We won’t call time on our pubs just yet
As 19 locals are granted protected status, Harry Wallop asks why they are deemed as worthy of preservation as St Paul’s
‘It’s great news these pubs are going to be preserved, though it should have happened a long time ago’
At first glance, the Black Horse on the outskirts of Birmingham does not seem much to write home about. Operated by JD Wetherspoon, the vast pub is situated on a rather unlovely stretch of the A38, near the university, and serves breakfast wraps from 8am plus strawberry and lime cider until closing time.
But today, it is one of 19 public houses being listed by Historic England, the body that helps preserve buildings of great architectural and historic merit.
All were built in the interwar period, mostly between the end of the 1920s and middle of the 1930s. And according to Roger Bowdler, the director of listing at Historic England, they fulfil the criteria of every listed building from St Paul’s Cathedral and Chatsworth House down to a modest Edwardian terraced house or Norman parish church.
“Listing is about identifying special architectural and historic interest. A lot of the interest in architecture is not just about the aesthetics, it’s also the stories it tells. In terms of social history, these are really important places,” he says.
A closer look at the Black Horse shows that, indeed, it is a fascinating building. Built in 1929, it is a grand monument to the Tudorbethan revival. The outside is timbered with gables, carved woodwork, leaded glass, fine stonework and chimneys.
In the baronial hall bar on the ground floor, there is a Tudor-looking stone fireplace with an impressively large carving of a black horse.
Historic England is not just interested in the Disneyfied version of Tudor England that became very fashionable in this period – in pubs, as well in the new Metroland suburbs. It also wants to preserve a particular slice of economic and social history, when leisure became big business, not just in the Art Deco bingo halls and cinemas.
Brewing companies after the First World War started a conscious ‘improved pub’ movement.
“They wanted to improve the image of drinking – to move away from that Victorian, rather scuzzy beer house,” explains Bowdler. “It was cleaner, it often provided food, it aimed at wider clientele than just male drinkers.
“Sometimes the bigger pubs have family rooms, gaming rooms, restaurant provision and even dance halls in the really big ones.”
At the Black Horse, there is a fullscale bowling green at the back, managing to cleverly combine both the respectable aspect of pubs along with a suitably Tudor pastime.
I met Bowdler in the Golden Heart, in Spitalfields, east London. Designed in 1934 by Arthur Sewell, the in-house architect for the Truman Brewery, it is in the more modest neo-Georgian style, with some beautiful Arts & Crafts details, such as the brick and tile fireplace, the high wood panelling, opaque glass wall-mounted lamp shades and, crucially, ladies’ lavatories.
Victorian pubs had mostly neglected women drinkers, the great majority of whom did not see them as respectable establishments. These new venues had facilities galore aimed at women, including the lounge (virtually unheard of before the First World War), and multiple loos. Paintings of elder statesmen and prize fighters were banished in favour of pictures of flowers in an attempt to project a feminine image.
But what is interesting is how conservative the architecture is. None of the 19 are modern; all are either neo-Georgian or neo-Tudor. “The 1930s is not all about slinky, chrome, Americana and Art Deco,” says Bowdler. “A lot of it is about reinventing the idea of England.”
Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, spends much of her time campaigning for high-profile modernist buildings. But she says: “The history of 20th-century architecture is more complicated than the outline many might have. These Tudorbethan and neo-Georgian buildings are part of a rejection of 1920s and 1930s modernism, a fantasy of going back to an older world.”
The listing of these pubs, mostly in Greater London and the West Midlands, comes just a few months after property developers pulled down – without any warning or permission – the neo-Georgian Carlton Tavern in Kilburn, north London. Westminster council has subsequently ordered it to be rebuilt. Paul Moody, who co-wrote The
Search for the Perfect Pub, says: “It’s great news that these pubs are going to be preserved, though it should have happened a long time ago.
“These places cannot be pulled down. They are part of who we are. Property developers do not understand they are part of the social fabric of these areas.” He argues that the improved pub movement closely fit that of the ideal pub, as described by George Orwell in his The Moon
Under Water essay of 1946, where people “go for conversation as much as for the beer” and which should be “family gathering places”.
Moody says: “Orwell would love this. For him, a pub was where you could go for quiet contemplation as much as the drink.”
The pub industry, over the past generation, has been hit hard by rising taxes, supermarket competition, the smoking ban and a change in drinking habits. In 1980, there were 69,000 pubs. Now there are 48,000 – fewer than the number of supermarkets.
Being listed, however, is not a guarantee a pub will not be turned into a shop or luxury apartment. There are 378,000 separate properties on the Historic England database and any changes are determined by each local authority. “It stops unconsidered change, but it doesn’t rule out change altogether,” explains Bowdler. “You can’t stop progress, you can’t insist a thing never alters.”
But Moody says he is far more optimistic about the future of pubs than a few years ago, not least due to the huge growth in craft beers. Indeed, the rate of closures is slowing considerably, from a nadir of 52 a week to 13 a week, according to the British Beer and Pub Association.
“Pubs are now places where far more young people want to go and enjoy the experience,” says Moody.
“A new generation are drinking local beers and ales. The irony is that the greatest movement to preserve these lovely old pubs has come from drinkers themselves, who have helped a whole raft of pubs be refurbished and find a new life.
“The pub will never die.”