Pint enthusiasts and wine lovers have been called on to shun country inns and visit Britain’s often overlooked and misunderstood estate pubs before they disappear.
Historians and pub activists have urged Mirror’s readers to do their bit and help save an often overlooked breed of boozer that is increasingly at risk of vanishing from our streets, having been forgotten in favour of posher countryside inns. Estate pubs were the first built after WWII that came to symbolise the return of normal life and hope.
Architectural investigators Matthew Bristow and Emily Cole warn that post-war drinking dens have fallen out of fashion, yet symbolise an important part of the UK’s history – its long, hard climb from the misery of WWII to a brighter, prosperous future.
For the 12 years during and after the war, not a single pub was constructed anywhere in the country, thanks to building restrictions that lasted from 1940 to 1952. Once they were lifted, what emerged were a series of innovative, modernist, often brutalist building projects that embraced a growing sense of post-war positivity as Britain looked towards the future.
In the wake of wartime attrition and a desire for a bright new world, architects began to dream up properties of all kinds with bold shapes, light interiors and daring layouts as councils across the country built 1.47million homes during the 1950s, in a desperate race to fix the housing shortage that resulted from the Blitz. Many were built on vast estates that embraced new ideals of how people should live in a far more structured way than the higgedly-piggedly towns and cities that had evolved pre-war.
At the centre of almost all of these estates was a pub. Or in some cases, several.
Where 50 years before the pub was a sleazy place and haunt of the working man, by the 1950s that had all changed. It was considered a vital part of every modern community and a place for the family. The shift came thanks to concerted effort by breweries determined to expand their businesses, as well as from central government lawmakers.
The grand, mirror strewn, glitzy pubs of the late Victorian era were replaced by plainer and more accessible pubs designed to swap shadowy nooks and corners for a new openness. Standing bars were removed; pubs started serving food and hosting events in function and ball rooms; separate entrances were built to encourage women and families in.
“They became destinations. And this went hand in hand with the growth of the motorcar. These new pubs had big car parks. The idea was to make pubs places where you do other leisure pursuits rather than just drink,” Matthew told the Mirror over a pint at the Festival Inn in Poplar, East London.
At the same time as these new design concepts were being embraced, bars, clubs and discos were popping up as the building boom continued and new forms of culture were embraced. This in turn led architects to innovate and start building ‘themed pubs’.
One example is the Never Turn Back near Great Yarmouth which serves as a memorial to the Caister Lifeboat disaster of 1901, when nine lifeboatmen had perished attempting to save a ship in distress. After the event assistant coxswain James Henry Haylett, who had lost two sons, a son-in-law and a grandson in the tragedy, was asked why the crew hadn’t abandoned the rescue. He explained that “They would never give up the ship … Going back is against the rules when we see distress signals like that”. The phrase was seized upon in the national press, and the pub built in their memory 56 years later – on the centenary of the crew’s founding.
Another is the Queen Bess public house which is named after a record-breaking blast furnace at the nearby Appleby-Frodingham steelworks, by 1945 the largest works of its kind in Britain.
Others followed physically wackier designs such as the Crumpled Horn in Swindon, Wiltshire, that was built as an irregular eight-sided polygon on a sloping site and has a single bar area structured like a spiralling ‘nautilus shell’, designed to deliver intimate drinking areas on a number of different levels.
For the past four years, Matthew and Emily have been working at Historic England to record the history of these pubs and hundreds of others like them, for the ‘Vulnerable Urban Building Types – The Post-War Public House’ project. Although it has not been published yet, already six of the pubs they archived have been listed, thanks to their work.
Yet many more have no special legal protection and they face uncertain futures. The pressure being felt by all pubs in 2024 – a year when 16 across the UK have shut each day, according to PWC – is felt particularly keenly by the post-war pub.
They are not cosy country inns able to flog £20 roasts and 18th century charm to battalions of Range Rover drivers. They are primarily liquid pubs which serve typically poorer communities, and they’re in buildings many wouldn’t give a second glance to.
“You see lots of buildings that were clearly once a pub are now a small Tesco or Sainsbury’s, something like that, because their location is ideal, they’re in the neighbourhood centre. By placing them at the heart of that community as a sort of community facility makes them attractive for conversion to other more 21st century community facilities, like your one-stop-shop mini supermarket,” Matthew added. “That’s the reason that every estate has one or had one – they were viewed by the planners at the time as a core community facility.”
When their research is published next year, Matthew and Emily hope it will serve as a vital resource to councils who may not know how much history is behind their local pub, and may now have cause to pause when considering whether to green-light its conversion into a supermarket or block of flats.
They are also hopeful more members of the public will follow in their footsteps and explore their local post-war pub. If they do, they will notice many of the features synonymous with the era and the transition of pubs from dens of inequity at the end of the 20th century, to the light, bright and welcoming buildings that first popped up in the interwar years. The flat roofs. The lack of dinghy nooks and booths for people to get up to no good in. The ghost of a bottle shop hatch outside. They may also find a friendlier group of people inside than they might have imagined.
“The welcome (we received) was almost uniformly friendly,” Matthew said of the more than 200 post-war pubs he and Emily have visited as part of the project.
“The stereotype is of a needle jumping in the jukebox and everyone stopping and turning around and looking at you because ‘you’re not from around there’. I mean, that’s the cliché. That’s the trope, but It wasn’t really what we found.”
It certainly wasn’t at the Festival Inn – the designated watering hole for a hugely ambitious section of the Festival of Britain in 1951, when 90,000 people stopped by for a pint in Britain’s first new pub in 12 years to watch the surrounding Lansbury Estate being built. Matthew joined the Mirror for a pint in the pub on a quiet Wednesday evening, highlighting the features that make it an excellent sample of its kind and making a plea to those who may visit it.
“I’d like to see them used more. To be valued more. We are guilty of driving through suburbs to a pub in the country to have a ploughman’s. Maybe people can challenge this view that they’re all like The Jockey in Shameless. They’re not rough. There is a lot more to them.”
