The Carlisle Experiment, the Inter-war Pub, and Me
Many architectural historians enjoy a visit to the pub, but the Society’s Julian Holder can rightly claim he was born with alcohol in his veins. Read on …
Frank J. Osborne, The Boars Head (1937), Perry Bar, Birmingham. It’s hard for pubs to look sober, but this one gets close, particularly in contrast to its ‘Brewers Tudor’ contemporaries .
We may well feel we are living in unprecedented times, but that’s not so true if we look at the public house. Despite our anguish at the brief closure of pubs due to Covid-19, this has happened before. Within weeks of the outbreak of the First World War, the Defence of the Realm Act – affectionately known as DORA – had imposed restricted opening hours that stayed in place for much of the last century. While pubs had previously been open all day, consumption was now restricted to a mere five hours. Although there was some regional variety, this was roughly between midday and two o’clock, and then from six o’clock till nine o’clock in the evening. One of the beneficial impacts of this was on family life; another was on the family budget. Working-class men could no longer stop for a drink on their way into work, and no longer take their weekly wages straight to the pub and spend the majority before they got home. As a writer in the magazine The Englishwoman observed, ‘if he chooses at the week’s end to hand his wife only five or ten shillings she has no remedy’.
How to make an architectural historian? First catch your Neo-Tudor pub – The Welcome Inn (1933), Southmead, Bristol, the author’s home from the age of seven.
As both the son, and grandson, of publicans, I can attest to the fact that the imposition of these hours improved my family life as I grew up in a succession of pubs in the 1960s and 1970s in the West Country. It allowed my mother to tear up and down the stairs from the bar to check on both my brother and me … and whatever was burning in the oven. Last orders were called at half past two in the afternoon, glasses collected, washed and dried, the floors swept, the ‘Vent-Axia’ extractor fan switched on to clear the building of smoke (other makes were available), counter and tables wiped clean, jukebox (optional depending on the pub) switched off, toilets checked for ‘stragglers’, bar staff thanked and sent on their way home, and the doors finally locked, so we could sit as a family and enjoy lunch around three o’clock. Then a couple of hours together before re-bottling the shelves, changing barrels, and starting all over again. I knew the more I helped the quicker I’d get my parents back.
Harry Redfern, The Apple Tree (1927), Carlisle. Despite the 'improvement' of many back-street pubs over the previous decade, it was only with The Apple Tree that Harry Refern and the Central Control Board started to design new pubs along 'improved' lines, including a separate Women's Room.
What I hadn’t appreciated until I conducted research for English Heritage in the early 1990s on inter-war pubs was that my family life was one of the things that guaranteed the success of the business. Neither did I realise the importance of lavatories and their lobbies as one of the chief improvements to pub design. Brewers had to improve sanitation not only from the point of view of health, but also, crucially, to encourage women customers – the brewers’ growth market of the inter-war period! Publicans also had to be approved for an annual licence ‘for the sale of intoxicating liquors’ – as it used to say over the door as you entered. Therefore the character of the publican had to be fairly spotless in contrast to his Victorian forebears – and a wife and children were part of this assessment.
The Gretna Tavern (1916), Carlisle. The first major improved public house created by the State – the architect for the conversion, Harry Redfern, was instructed to supply spittoons. He refused.
Following the introduction of restricted hours in 1914, other impositions were soon placed on ‘the trade’, as it was known. The most draconian was the creation of the Central Control Board in 1915 and its effective nationalisation of the brewing industry, and in particular of its retail outlets in and around Enfield Lock, Dingwall, but most of all Carlisle, in order to safeguard armament production. In Carlisle this included four breweries and 119 pubs. Described by Labour’s Ernest Selley in his 1927 book The English Public House as ‘poky drinking dens’, many of these pubs were considered unsuitable and were closed down. The remainder were ‘improved’ under the Board’s architectural office. Headed by the architect Harry Redfern, and assisted by Joseph Seddon, George Walton, Charles Voysey and Basil Oliver, all were of an Arts and Crafts persuasion.
F.G. Newman assisted by W.H. Fleeming, The Fellowship, Bellingham, 1923–24. one of brewer Barclay Perkins’ improved public houses serving the enormous new council estates built under the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ campaign.
Redfern and the Board looked to the development of the pre-war ‘Improved Public House’ (promoted by the Temperance Movement) as its model of respectability and moderation. But this was not simply a matter of reducing hours and consumption but of architecture as an engine of social reform. Together, Redfern’s team opened up the interiors by demolishing internal walls (and the so-called ‘snob screens’), making a larger ‘light and airy’ interior. Here would be no ‘snugs’, and no hiding place for inveterate drunks or for any other crimes and misdemeanours. Seating was introduced to combat what was derided as ‘perpendicular drinking’, counters reduced in length, food and non-alcoholic drinks made available, and games and music introduced to slow the rate of consumption and attract a new, more temperate type of customer.
Francis Goldsborough, The Black Horse (1929), Northfield, Birmingham, perhaps the finest surviving improved public house of the inter-war period. © Geoff Brandwood.
Hard to describe as pubs, these reformed establishments were as readily called ‘refreshment taverns’ or even ‘recreation centres’, and the first – ‘The Gretna Tavern’ – opened this very month in 1916. The Gretna was in fact Carlisle’s former head post office (which included the adjoining Athenaeum, absorbed in 1874 to act as an enlarged sorting office) so gave the right image of sobriety – despite its large, useful and quickly adapted counter. Other major alterations to Carlisle’s pubs soon followed and the so-called ‘Carlisle Experiment’ was deemed such a success at the end of the war that it continued until the 1970s. Either wittingly, or unwittingly, the state had given ‘the trade’ a recipe for post-war success.
Harry Redfern. The Crescent (1932), Carlisle. Redfern's architecture at its most flamboyant, yet the Hispano-Moorish style was judged too fancy for Carlisle.
Quick off the blocks, major regional brewers across the country, such as Watney’s, Barclay Perkins, Truman’s and Mitchell & Butler’s, took the lessons learnt and quickly began building improved public houses during the 1920s, including The Rose in Camberwell, London, by Simpson & Ayrton, and the enormous Neo-Geo box of The Downham in Bromley, London, by F.G. Newnham and W.H. Fleeming. Not until 1927 did Redfern and his team in Carlisle begin to design new public houses – for instance The Apple Tree, The Crescent (its Hispano-Moorish architecture judged too exotic) and The Magpie – that perpetuated the experiment, perhaps as a warning to ‘the trade’ to keep its house in order.
Ex-military vehicles and their drivers found a new occupation after the First World War as charabancs propelling the new leisure industries. The expansion of the road-house, and their family-friendly gardens, was partly fuelled by outings such as this one, featuring the author's father as a young boy in the front seat.
Basil Oliver, The Red Lion (1938–39), Grantchester. Oliver's Arts and Crafts credentials shine through in this vision of an unchanging rural pub, complete with murals by Ernest Dinkel illustrating Rupert Brooke's poetry.
So it is the Carlisle Experiment – and the private brewers who adopted its methods – that we have to thank for the inter-war pub in all its mock-Tudor and Neo-Georgian glory. Birmingham in particular was, and in many ways still is, very heaven for the improved public house. With its sympathetic licensing magistrates willing to allow a large new suburban type of refreshment tavern – the ‘road-house’ – on new arterial roads in return for the ‘surrender’ of the licences of several poor-quality inner-city pubs, the so-called ‘Birmingham Surrender’ scheme led the country. The resulting pubs, such as The Black Horse, The Kingstanding, The Hare and Hounds, The Tyburn and The Royal Oak, were designed by some of the city’s finest architects. They were built not only with the usual public bar (but now with seating) and a smoking room or two, but increasingly with a lounge bar set aside (with higher prices) for a more ‘respectable class’ and where women customers were more welcome.
Encouraging ‘respectable’ women to use pubs for the first time (rather than have them stand around in the off-sales, or outside with the children) was a major change in public houses that resulted from the ‘Carlisle Experiment’. The ‘Women’s Room’ – introduced in Carlisle – didn’t last long into the inter-war period but encouraged a completely new type of public house that catered for a wider group of customers, and activities, than previously. Charles Ashbee went so far as to call the improved public house ‘one of the greatest achievements of modern democracy’.
The United States had introduced Prohibition in 1920 (and in so doing gave us the gangster movie), before repealing it in 1933. This uncompromising example from across the Atlantic, together with growing female emancipation and the threat of nationalization, gave brewers an additional incentive to clean up their act in the 1920s and 1930s and make the pub more relevant to the post-war period. Thus the ‘poky drinking dens’ of Edwardian England gave way to ‘the improved public house’ of the inter-war period, a transition ably chronicled in Basil Oliver’s book of 1947, The Renaissance of the English Public House. Oliver became the great proselytiser for this new type of pub, but its heyday (especially that of the transgressive American-influenced road-house) was to be short-lived.
Bateman & Bateman, The Kingstanding (1935), Birmingham. Long since demolished, it was typical of the quality of Birmingham's inter-war pubs – similar architecture can still be seen in such examples as The Black Lion, Northfield.
Reviewing the book shortly after publication Pevsner condemned it. ‘The function of the pub,’ he argued, ‘is company, human nearness … snugness not smugness’. Oliver’s captions ‘horrify me’, he claimed, and concluded of the book: ‘I’d call it “Decline and Fall”.’ Oliver did feature E.B. Musman’s modernist work for Watford-based brewery Benskin’s, and included such well-known modernist, or rather ‘moderne’, pubs as The Prospect Inn in Minster, Kent, by Oliver Hill, and Pick, Everard, Keay and Gimson’s County Arms in Blaby, Leicester (which even had a built-in pram shelter). However, the progressive social reforms embraced by the traditional late Arts and Crafts architecture that Oliver approved of were rarely clad in the progressive modernist architecture that Pevsner wanted to see.
Re-visiting my research after nearly 25 years for a forthcoming publication, I now realise even more the impact of Redfern’s work in Carlisle on my upbringing. I was raised in two improved Victorian ‘poky drinking dens’, and two ‘improved public houses’. Family life in the improved public houses that I remember best – as viewed from the bay window of an eight-bedroomed, wood-panelled, 1930s ‘Brewers Tudor’ road-house with bowling green, putting course, rose garden, playground and our own front door – was infinitely preferable. So many thanks to the ‘Carlisle Experiment’.
Julian Holder is a Deputy Editor of Architectural History, and was for a number of years our Education Officer, directing PhD Scholarships and establishing the annual PhD Workshop. Former Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies at Edinburgh College of Art, he has also held positions as a Historic Buildings Inspector for English Heritage, worked on the re-survey of listed buildings for CADW, and was the first paid Casework Officer for the Twentieth Century Society. He has held a number of lecturing posts in UK universities and currently teaches architectural history at Oxford, where he is a visiting fellow at Kellogg College and an advisor to the Getty Conservation Institute on Twentieth Century Heritage. He is contributing an essay on the improved public house to Reconstruction; Architecture, the Built Environment, and the Aftermath of the First World War, forthcoming from Bloomsbury, while his next book, Arts and Crafts Architecture: ‘Beauty’s Awakening’ is due for publication by Crowood Press early in 2021. He currently enjoys a pint in the Helzephron Inn near Helston in Cornwall.