Categories
Beer history opinion pubs

Session #81: Scary Beer Feminists

Floor mosaic advertising a pub lounge bar, by Duncan C, via Flickr.
Source: Duncan C, Flickr Creative Commons.

The beer blogging Session is hosted this month by Nitch who has asked us to consider women and beer.

Having written a long piece about women in British brewing and beer campaigning in September, and about the sexualisation of female bar staff here, we decided to focus this time on women as pubgoers.

Women drinking beer and visiting pubs is by no means a new thing.

Thanks to the splendid Mass Observation study The People and the Pub, we have a very good idea of how many women were regularly using pubs in Bolton, Lancashire, in the nineteen-thirties, for example.

(January)

Town centre pubs

Main road pubs outside town centre

Weekdays

Weekends

Weekdays

Weekends

Males

667

532

418

513

Females

140

184

39

94

% females

17.4

25.7

8.5

15.5

We also know what they were drinking: relatively expensive bottled beer, and especially Guinness, with a further surcharge applied because they drank it in the ‘lounges’ and ‘parlours’ with their pot plants and soft furnishings, rather than the bare-bones ‘vault’ (public bar).

Though they were usually escorted to the pub by their husbands, the men usually drank standing in the vault where the beer was cheaper. On the rare occasions men did sit in the lounge, they were expected to wear Sunday best and wash behind their ears.

In the lounge, among themselves, women were free to get drunk, swear, tell dirty stories and otherwise misbehave without the threat of violence or the risk of unwelcome sexual attention from men.

These days, lounges have all but disappeared from pubs, in part because they came to be seen as a sign of snobbery and social segregation; and women entering pubs alone are no longer assumed to be prostitutes or ‘asking for it’.

Nonetheless,  pubs still too often feel like male spaces where lone women are, if not made to feel unwelcome, then at least the subject of stares and comments.

The idea of the lounge — a safe space in the pub ‘owned’ by women — should not sound as appealing as it does in 2013.

Categories
Beer history london pubs

The George Inn, Southwark, 1895

Illustration of the George Inn, Southwark, from Our Rambles in London, 1895.

The latest addition to our collection of dusty old walking guides is Our Rambles in London by E.S. Machell Smith, from 1895.

It’s a fairly bland book altogether, and nor are its illustrations (as you can see from the above) especially exciting. It does, however, contain an account of a visit to the George Inn which acts an interesting footnote to Chapter Twelve of Pete Brown’s Shakespeare’s Local, concerning Mrs Amelia Murray, her daughter Agnes, and Joey the parrot:

[We] turned in under an archway over which was written The George Inn, where we were greatly cheered by the sight of a double tier of bedroom galleries, with old wooden balustrades ornamented by flower-pots.

After consulting a policeman standing at the entrance as to whether he thought it was a place ladies could lunch at, and receiving an answer in the affirmative, we walked in, and were met by a fair slim woman, who, in reply to our request for refreshment, said ‘she was afraid she could do nothing for us just then, as all her gentlemen were lunching, but if we cared to walk upstairs and look round we were heartily welcome.’

Gladly availing ourselves of this permission, we went up some low wooden steps and found ourselves on the first balcony, on to which all the rooms open, their occupants’ only mode of exit and entrance being by this way.

More stairs brought us to the next floor; we peeped into some of the rooms, whose windows and doors also opened on to a picturesque wooden gallery, which, like the first, overlooked the yard below, and must, therefore, have been very convenient for watching the plays that used to be acted in the yards of the old Borough hostelries. The bedrooms, though dark, were far from uncomfortable, and contained some nice pieces of old furniture.

It was altogether very fascinating, and we imagined ourselves staying there, and wondered if any one would ever think of searching for us in such a retreat.

As we came downstairs and were about to thank our hostess, she came forward and said that, if we didn’t mind waiting in her room (where she was dispensing cigars and sodas to some of her gentlemen friends), she would have a lunch laid for us in her own back parlour. Accordingly we seated ourselves, keeping our eyes discreetly fixed upon our guide-books, in which, on all occasions and in all places, we find quite as much protection as Unda ever did in her lion.

Meanwhile our fair friend held her little court, and it was charming to see the deference and respect with which she was treated, as she graciously inquired after the health of this one, how the other was getting on with his work, where So-and-so thought of going for Christmas, &c., &c.

Soon and elderly lady (presumably the landlady) announced that our repast was ready, and were conducted into a tiny little sanctum, rather dark, but very snug and warm, with a fat retriever asleep under the table, and a green parrot close to the fire.

And a footnote to a footnote: we think E.S. Machell Smith (or Machell-Smith…) was Christopher Isherwood’s grandmother, Emily, and this passage was probably written by his mother, Kathleen.

Categories
pubs real ale

Light Split at the Fountain, Mevagissey

Light split (HSD and Light Ale).

We’ve got quite good at working out which pub in a Cornish town or village we’re likely to enjoy the most.

Where there are multiple St Austell houses (there often are), we avoid the managed, over-polished, plasticky places, and, instead, look out for the signs — ‘Billy and Lynn welcome you to the Fountain!’

Covered in foliage and claiming to be the oldest inn in Mevagissey, the Fountain certainly looked cosy. Ducking inside, we found all the indicators of a ‘proper’ pub, including a knackered piano.

Hoping for a pint of Proper Job, we were disappointed, at first, to see only Tribute, Dartmoor and HSD on the bar. While we waited, however, we began to notice other pleasing details, from bottles of brown and light ale in the fridges, to Gold Label Barley Wine on a shelf beneath the optics.

‘It’s one of those time travel pubs,’ we muttered to each other.

And, as it happened, the Tribute was at its best, and HSD better than we’ve ever tasted it — drier, with that unbeatable complexity that (we think) makes itself evident in many cask ales about twenty-four hours before they turn to vinegar.

With plenty of time before our bus was due, though we didn’t fancy the look of the Gold Label, we couldn’t resist trying both brown and light splits, prompting the veteran landlord to share a bit of insight:

No-one buys light ale any more, but all I ever used to drink was light splits. The West Country was never mild-drinking territory, so brown split was never that popular.

Greene King Light Ale was surprisingly decent on its own — a nice whiff of English hops — but tasted, we both agreed, exactly like the nineteen-eighties. That is, it reminded Boak of sipping beer from her Dad’s glass in a pub garden when she was little; and triggered Bailey’s thirty-year-old memories of ‘helping’ with the stock-take in the cellar at the pub where he grew up in Exeter.

A time travel pub indeed.

There’s a small gallery of images from the Fountain on our Facebook page.

Categories
pubs real ale

All Change for Bristol Beer

The Barley Mow, Bristol.

Bristol has long been a worthwhile destination for a beery weekend but these days, it’s in another league.

When we first went to the Capital of the West Country with beer on our minds, back in 2009, we found just about enough to keep us stimulated. Last weekend, however, we found that an explosion of new beer-focused pubs and bars meant that a weekend wasn’t long enough. We did, however, make it to three new venues targeting the beer geek market.

Maui Brewing Co Lemongrass Saison.

The Bristol Beer Factory abandoned ship at the Grain Barge earlier this year and their flagship pub is now the Barley Mow. Sitting in the middle of a eerily quiet industrial estate near Temple Meads, its location does not seem promising, but it is certainly worth the detour.

The now-obligatory back wall keg taps were dispensing beers from the Sierra Nevada and Maisel, and we just missed Schnoodlepip, the Wild Beer Company’s collaboration with Mark C. ‘Formerly of Dark Star’ Tranter and Kelly Ryan. (CAMRGB had drunk it all, perhaps, having passed through mere hours before us, leaving a trail of beer mats behind them.)

The seven cask beers were a good mix of pale’n’hoppy, brown’n’sweet and black’n’roasty, though perhaps not in absolutely tip-top condition, with Moor Radiance in particular seeming a little tired.

The beer that really knocked our socks off was from a can — Maui’s Lemongrass Saison (5% ABV). It couldn’t have tasted any fresher and the pleasure of it was its simplicity: more like a mildly grapefruity lager than a funky Belgian barnyard beast.

The pub’s interior is perhaps a little lacking in character, but that will come with time.

Gents toilets at the Royal Navy Volunteer, Bristol.
Gents toilets at the Royal Navy Volunteer, Bristol.

Elsewhere in town, we enjoyed the just re-opened, freshly-painted, entirely reinvented Royal Navy Volunteer. Like the Barley Mow, it needs ‘wearing in’, but it certainly had interesting beer, from both from keg and cask. The highlight was Siren Soundwave American Pale Ale (5.6%), an excellent example of the type of beer most breweries In That Other Beer Market Category have at the heart of their range. (The new ‘boring brown bitter’.)

Beer Emporium, Bristol.

Almost next door, we did not find much to enjoy at the Bristol Beer Emporium. The setting has huge potential — a vaulted cellar with exposed brickwork which reminded us of being in Germany — but something about the fixtures and fittings made it feel like a chain pub or hotel bar. After a long wait, we were   v e r y   s l o w l y   served expensive, lifeless Sierra Nevada Torpedo in half pint tumblers, because all the nice glasses were dirty. We did not have a good time, but perhaps we caught it on an off-day.

If you’d like to go and investigate Bristol’s beer scene yourself, you might want to time your visit to coincide with Bristol Beer Week, which runs from 3 to 9 October this year.

Categories
Beer history pubs

How Many Pubs Are We Actually Losing?

We were surprised to note from Ron Pattinson’s very useful compilation of beer- and pub-related statistics that the number of pubs in England and Wales increased in the forty years up to 2001.

What is particularly confusing is that numbers from the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) seem to show the opposite. Here they are plotted against each other on a graph:

Graph: UK Government statistics (England and Wales) via Ron Pattinson vs. numbers given by the  BBPA.
UK Government statistics (England and Wales) via Ron Pattinson vs. numbers given by the BBPA for the whole of the UK.

Perhaps the BBPA are defining ‘pubs’ very precisely? Guess we’ll have to save up for a copy of their Bumper Book of Statistics to find out.

We haven’t yet identified a set of UK Government figures that deal specifically with pubs over a very long period, but the graph below is based on their numbers for licences to sell alcohol in England and Wales for 1960 to 2010. (We’ve also used UK population stats from Wikipedia to give a rough on-licence-per-head indicator.)

Graph: on licenses, off licences and on licences per head.

Even assuming that a good number of those new licences are for cafes and restaurants, this doesn’t seem to show a catastrophic collapse in the number of places where booze is available.

This is, of course, just an early morning pondering session, and we’re not drawing any firm conclusions just yet, but we do have a theory: if pubs are closing en masse, it is in post-industrial communities, and is a symptom of localised economic decline rather than a wholesale rejection by communities of the very idea of the pub.

We’ll let Ron have the final word, from a note accompanying his statistics page: ‘All I can remember are pub closures and derelict boozers on every other corner. Just shows the value of subjective observations.’

Can anyone point to reliable statistics on the numbers of pubs opening and closing, ideally from a source other than an industry or lobbying group whose argument depends on a story of woe?