Variations on a Theme: Regional Differences in Pubs
Geoff Brandwood takes a grand tour of historic public houses throughout England to explore some regional and, occasionally, surprising differences.
The Black Horse, Northfield, Birmingham (1929). This vast road-house is almost certainly the grandest expression of the nostalgic Tudor Revival in pub architecture during the early 20th century. Photo: Geoff Brandwood.
Twenty years ago, I became involved with the Campaign for Real Ale’s project to create a National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors. It was an eye-opener. Hitherto, I had done my bit for the brewing and pub industries by drinking all over the UK, but it had never really occurred to me that there were all sorts of differences between pubs in different regions. Here I’d like to guide you through some of my discoveries over the length and breadth of England.
Let’s start in Birmingham where I grew up and started my under-age drinking career in the early 1960s, when multi-room pubs were still the norm. A feature of many street corners in Brum are glowingly red pubs faced with brick and terracotta, such as the Anchor in the Digbeth area. [PIC 1] They were put up around 1900 during the late Victorian pub-building boom, and this distinctive architecture was adopted by both of the city’s now long-lost brewers, Ansells and Mitchells & Butlers. This rather strange ‘me-too' approach among brewers is something we’ll meet again, in a different form, on the south coast.
Another great feature around Birmingham is the road-house. From the start of the 20th century, the licensing magistrates were keen to have ‘fewer and better’ (as their slogan had it) pubs. Brewers surrendered multiple licences from their prolific inner-city pubs to be allowed to build grand new ones on main road sites in the burgeoning suburbs. The scale and stylistic range in Birmingham seems unsurpassed. One of the greatest is the astounding Black Horse, Northfield, of 1929.
The Edwardian ceramic frontage of the Fountain, North End, Portsmouth. Photo: Michael Schouten.
Colourful ceramic work at the Fox Tavern, Gosport, to entice the local populace. Photo: David Seall.
And so to the south coast. Various pubs throughout the country built around 1900 have distinctive ceramic frontages, but nowhere is there such a concentration as Portsmouth and its environs. If it was red brick and terracotta for a statement in Birmingham, here it was remarkable displays of ceramics, as can be seen at the Fountain in the middle of the city, and the gloriously lurid Fox Tavern across the harbour in Gosport.
In the north, pubs with very distinctive planning can be found on both sides of the Pennines. One of these is what we may call a drinking lobby – that is you go in and find yourself in an area mainly used by stand-up drinkers in front of a servery. This is effectively the public bar, while separate rooms lead off in various directions to cater for more sedate, sedentary customers. A good example is the Alexandra in Stockport dating from 1911, where a short corridor leads to this lobby or servery area, which is surrounded by other rooms.
The Alexandra, Stockport (1911), has a drinking lobby with rooms leading off and a fine array of ceramic decoration. Photo: Geoff Brandwood.
The central core of the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, Liverpool (c. 1898–1900), which in February 2020 became the first Victorian pub to receive a Grade I listing. Photo: Geoff Brandwood.
A slight variation on this particular theme is Liverpool’s stupendous Philharmonic Dining Rooms of about 1900. The main entrance from Hope Street brings you into what is really a drinking lobby/servery area. To the right are a couple of rooms with seating and a corridor to what was originally a mighty billiard room. Unmissable.
Te front entrance at the Swan with Two Necks, Stockport (1926) leads to a corridor that expands to form a drinking area in front of the servery. Photo: Geoff Brandwood.
This idea of a stand-up drinking area also finds expression in what we might call the ‘side-corridor plan’, something associated with narrow urban sites in the north. Down one side there’s a corridor from the entrance that expands in the middle to provide a drinking lobby in front of the servery, as seen at the Swan with Two Necks in Stockport.
Staying in the North West, a number of pubs have a layout of a public bar on the street corner surrounded by an L-shaped corridor, off which the other spaces lead. Examples are the Stork, Birkenhead, Lion Tavern in central Liverpool and the Briton’s Protection in Manchester. All these pubs have a distinctive feature that is pretty well absent in the south, namely full-height counter screens, the lower parts of which can be raised or lowered.
The Stork, Birkenhead, with L-shaped drinking corridor wrapping round servery and public bar. There are screens with sliding sashes to obtain service. These fittings are probably of c. 1905. Photo: Geoff Brandwood.
Attached to the servery at the Barley Mow, Marylebone, London, are two very small drinking boxes, unique survivals of what were probably common in London pubs. Photo: Geoff Brandwood.
Needless to say, there is a lot of diversity amongst London’s several thousand pubs, but a theme that emerges is Victorian Londoners’ enthusiasm for small drinking spaces. At that time, all over the country, pubs consisted of multiple spaces, but in London drinkers seemed to expect an extra touch of cosiness in small snugs. This was often achieved by screens radiating round the servery. The greatest surviving example of this is the Prince Alfred, Maida Vale, a perfectly ordinary-sized pub, but with no fewer than five compartments created by timber screens (a photograph of this extraordinary spectacle is included in our recent post on the changing face of the pub from the 1960s on). For the most extreme surviving example of tiny drinking compartments, the pub to visit is the Barley Mow, near Baker Street Underground Station. Here, there are a couple of boxes each of which accommodates not more than four or five people – together, they look like a pair of over-height box-pews from a Georgian church. No social distancing here!
In many a Victorian or early 20th-century pub in the Midlands and the north, you will find bell-pushes, once used to summon table service. Strangely they are virtually absent in London. Mark Girouard in his great book Victorian Pubs, first published in 1975, explain this by suggesting that table service was dying out in London by the end of the 19th century (although this fails to explain the rarity of bell-pushes across the south). Table service remained alive and well in the north – at a handful of pubs on Merseyside it has actually remained a continuous tradition to this day. It is, of course, making a comeback in our COVID-ridden days!
Dispensing direct from cask, the Square & Compass, Worth Matravers, Dorset. Such would have been pretty much universal 200 years ago. Photo: Michael Slaughter.
Finally, the matter of dispensing beer. A fair minority of traditional pubs in the south still serve beer direct from the cask, but this almost unknown in the north. Why this should be so is a puzzle, at least to the present writer. Related to this, it’s worth mentioning that a fundamental change affecting the internal appearance and character of pubs since the 18th and early 19th centuries has been the rise of the hand pump and the introduction of bar counters. Throughout the entire UK, there are probably only a dozen pubs that do not now have the ubiquitous bar counter. This photograph shows action stations one of these rare survivors, the wonderfully unspoilt Square & Compass at Worth Matravers on the Dorset coast.
So historic pubs certainly aren’t the same everywhere, and there are still puzzles to be unlocked.
If you have any thoughts or information arising out of this article, do get in touch with Geoff Brandwood via CAMRA’s Pub Heritage Group at info@pubheritage.camra.org.uk. He has published the lavishly illustrated, 320-page Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, covering all 260 CAMRA National Inventory pubs. Normally only £9.99 (plus £2.50 postage) it’s on special offer to readers of this article with a 10% discount at CAMRA’s shop here. Quote code BBRHPOFFER2020 at checkout.
Geoff Brandwood is a former chair of the Victorian Society and part of CAMRA’s Heritage Pub Group. His guide to a range of historic pub interiors throughout South East England, Real Heritage Pubs of the South East, has just been published.