Categories
Beer history pubs quotes

The Social Attractiveness of Pubs, 1901

“[Public houses] are, as a rule, brilliantly lit, and often gaudily, if cheaply, decorated. In winter they are always kept temptingly warm. The company is almost entirely composed of young persons, youths and girls, sitting round the room and at small tables… Every one is drinking, but not heavily… In a round of the public-houses [of York] which the writer made on Saturday evening in May 1901, the fact of their social attractiveness struck him very forcibly. It points to the need for the establishment on temperance lines of something equally attractive in this respect.”

Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree in Poverty: a study of town life (1908 edition) apparently liking pubs more than he wanted to.