This is another blatant attempt to get you to do my research for me. I'd like to hear what pubs were like around your way. Did they still have multiple rooms? Were the bogs outside? Was there waiter service? Please let me know.
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| Pub layout in The Pub and the People. |
Looking at the layout of a 1930s medium-sized Bolton pub in The Pub and the People, it’s very similar to that of many of the pubs in Leeds I frequented during the 1970s. Public bar at the front with the bar counter, then a couple of posher rooms at the back, served by a hatch at the back of the bar counter.
The Cardigan Arms, my regular haunt during my university days, retains this format. Except, being double-fronted, it has three posh rooms. Back then, most Tetley’s pubs had variations on this theme. With only the number of posh rooms varying with the size of the pub. Though the couple of Tetley’s 1960s pubs I visited had the typical post-war 50-50 split between a public bar and a lounge.
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| The public bar of the Cardigan Arms in Leeds, 2023. |
Even the pubs in Leeds city centre mostly retained at least two rooms. I’m struggling to think of an example of a pub that was knocked through into a single bar.
In the posh rooms, there were buttons at regular intervals along the walls. These were from the days of waiter and, in Leeds at least, were out of use. Odd pubs still had waiter service in the North. There were a couple in Liverpool. And Grimsby, where I remember visiting one with my brother.
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| The Cardigan Arms in Leeds, 2023. |
Outdoor toilets were the norm in Newark. At least for the gents. Sometimes, they were little more than a shed with a trough at the bottom of one wall. While in Leeds the toilets were mostly indoors. With some magnificent copper and tile extravaganzas. In which it was a pleasure to have a piss.
Interestingly, the ladies’ toilets in Leeds were almost always upstairs. A sign that they were an afterthought?
Any recollections of your own from the 1970s (or early 1980s) are more than welcome. It'll help me pad out the book from its current meagre 293 pages.
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The pubs I frequented in the early to late 70s, mostly South East London (Sydenham, Forest Hill, Catford) originally had two entrances, usually called saloon and public bars. The toilets would normally be out the back, the ladies’ toilets were often situated in the Saloon bar section. I can remember several had Off Sales in the 60s but they were gone by the 70s. During the 70s the dividing walls started to come down, much to the displeasure of the old boys in the public bars. I was never sure why the conversion happened; I'd be interested in your thoughts. The possibilities of a waiter service in the pubs I went to amused me, maybe now, in the gentrified areas of S.E.London.
Quite a few pubs in Bradford had outside toilets. One was the Gladstone (aka Sadbrick), a Bass Charrington pub on City Road just out of the city centre on the West, The bogs we built out of Sandstone flags, and of course with sandstone being porous, the piss just soaked into the stone and festered there for pretty much ever. The stink was something to... well encourage you to finish asap and get back in the pub. But there were quite a few similar.
Bradford pubs were for the most part smaller than their Leeds equivalents, and not so architecturally distinctive. Often there were just two rooms, the taproom and the lounge, More than three was unusual.
Manchester was different. Some huge pubs. You would go in the front door and enter a long wide corridor. A door (usually on the left) gave onto the Vault, usually a very large and Spartan room. This would be about half the area of the pub. It would have a large bar, and there would also be a bar onto the corridor, served rom the same area.
On the other side (usually right) there were rooms off the corridor, usually a pool room, a snug and a lounge. Some Holts pubs had huge snooker rooms. Most pubs were large, but the Jolly Angler (Hydes) near Piccadilly Station was tiny. Yet it had the traditional arrangement of Vault on the left (with log end dartboard) and a corridor, with snug, poolroom and lounge off to the right. There was a special pool cue, about a foot long, for tight shots.
It was quite magical, and never the same after it got knocked through later in the 80's.
Looking at that plan, I take it that "vault" refers to what might be called the public bar, is that correct?
The second entrance from the street allows access to a passageway, which leads to a lounge and a taproom.
What is a taproom?
As an American, I'm awfully curious how pubs actually worked. If you were a stranger from another place, walking in off the street, how did you decide which room to go in? How did you know what beers were available, how did you know how to order them?
I'm sure these are the kinds of things were obvious to people in the UK from an early age, but suppose you were someone from Kentucky or Lyon or Mumbai and just walked in, it's not clear to me how you'd navigate the system and its mix of traditions and unspoken rules.
Anonymous,
the choice of room was easy for me: public bar. For the simple reason that the beer was cheaper.
Pubs had to have a price list on display by law. So you could see a full list of options there. Draught beers you'd be able to see on the bar. Pumpclips on the handpumps, and keg in brightly-coloured boxes Telling you what they dispensed.
As for ordering, you just went up to the bas and asked.
Lambicman,
vaults is a Northwestern term for public bar.
Taproom, if I remember correctly, was a small room mostly reserved for regulars. It's also a Northwestern term, in this context. In other places, tap room was another word for public bar.
Absolutely classic feature that the door to the gents would be in the public bar/vault and the door to the ladies in the saloon/lounge.
In Glasgow it was bar and lounge. Many still have the two entrances which now incongruously both lead into the same one big room. Rarely any smaller rooms because Glasgow licensing board had a long tradition of disliking multi-roomed pubs. Rudolph Kenna book People's Palaces, which I assume you are familiar with, goes into this in much more detail than I can, and pre-dates my memory.
Down in Hampshire in the late seventies we had a mix of pubs that had always been a single room, pubs with the classic public and lounge or saloon and a few that were knocked through, this increased during the 70s and 80s. The decor difference could be quite stark, carpets were the norm in the lounge, boards, lino or tiles in the public, the carpet was occasionally carried half way up the counter. Copper topped tables in the lounge, plain wood, sometimes topped with Formica in the public. Pub games, darts, doms, cards, sometimes a pool/bar billiards table or table skittles were a mainly public bar thing. A few rural pubs had skittle alleys. Outside toilets were very common in rural pubs but even in a few town pubs, my town centre local had the gents at the far end of the yard and the ladies was inside the back entrance to the private quarters. I think the licensing bench wasn't keen on outside lavs and also had a thing about supervision and preferred small rooms done away with. Hand pumps were the usual dispense in town pubs but it wasn't unusual to find gravity dispense in the countryside. The only electric pump I came across in the south was a diaphragm one in a pub in Bournemouth. I think the custom of regulars having their own glass or pewter mug was discussed somewhere recently, that has died out over the last forty years as far as I can see.
I'm sure I recall Boak and Bailey articles which showed pictures of 'fun pubs' and their ilk in the 70's, possibly earlier, which were conversions from existing pubs. When did the ripping out of existing interiors really start? As distinct from the open plan estate pubs which were all new builds.
Anonymous,
I think large-scale gutting of pubs started in the 1960s.
I remember what I think was a hardy and Hanson pub design but copied by others was a double door entrance into a hallway type passage. Bar on the right. Lounge on the left. There was a hatch on one of the walls for those using the outside drinking area. Toilets at the far side of the passage way, men to one side, women the other. Was knocked into one by the pub company who knew better even though they had never been. Lasted about 6 months before being demolished. Tried to turn our estate pub into some sort of restaurant when it was a drinkers pub and nothing else.
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