Pub room names

This sort of thing happens to me quite often. I was rummaging through a pile of books looking for something. I didn’t find the book I sought, but tripped over another. One I’d forgotten I had. But very relevant to my current area of focus.

The book was “Beer in Britain”, a book based on a supplement which appeared in The Times newspaper in 1958. It’s a series of short articles on the subject of beer. I’ve owned it for a few years yet never really looked at it. That’s pretty typical of me. I buy books which I think might come in handy some day and then forget about them. Pretty sure I’ve still got a couple of books on bottling that I need to process.

I’ll be pestering you with plenty from “Beer in Britain”, starting with a useful guide to the terminology of pub rooms.

Sadly, most of these terms have disappeared along with the rooms that they designated. Few pubs retain the multiple-room layout. Those that do rarely have more than two these days. But even before the ravages of crap refurbishments in the 1960’s and 1970’s the number of rooms in pubs was being eroded. Pubs built before WW I, unless they were tiny, always had several rooms. Ironically, the larger “improved” pubs of the interwar years had fewer rooms. While those built after WW II were usually limited to just a Public Bar and a Lounge.

What isn’t mentioned in the list is a feature that was common in the North and the Midlands: a drinking corridor. The classic 19th-century design was to have a central serving area. The front of this was the bar counter for the taproom, the back faced onto a corridor, off which were all the other rooms. It’s not really a room in the sense of a Lounge or Public Bar, but was used for vertical drinking.

The names used for different rooms varied considerably from region to region. “Beer in Britain” rationalised that down to just northern and southern usage, using the River Trent as the dividing line. You may recall that I grew up in Newark, which is on the Trent. But on its southern bank. However, it was definitely a northern usage town.

Let’s take a look at those names in detail, starting with the South. 

Pub room names - Southern Usage
Public Bar	Where prices are lowest and furnishings simple.
Saloon Bar	A saloon was originally a spacious reception room in a private mansion, then in an inn; applied c. 1835 to the better-furnished room of a public house.
Lounge	Originally the hotel residents' sitting room. Now a superior saloon bar, often with waiter service and with no sale of draught beer.
Lounge Bar / Saloon Lounge	Midway in status between the saloon and the lounge.
Private Bar	Midway in status between public bar and saloon, intended for customers wishing to conduct private conversations, or for men accompanied by women: sometimes deputizing for a Ladies' Bar.
Ladies' Bar	Self-explanatory.
Bar Parlour	An inner room, without a street entrance, reserved traditionally for regular customers or the landlord's intimates. Now rare.
Four-Ale-Bar	Colloquial term for the public bar; so named because mild ale. the working man's drink, used to be sold at fourpence a quart.
Buffet Bar	A refreshment bar (1869). Modern equivalents are the Lunch Bar and the Snack Bar, of saloon bar status.
Tap Room	Originally (1807) a room where beer was tapped or drawn from a cask. Now an old-fashioned name for the public bar of an hotel or country alehouse. Not found in London.
Hotel Bar	A saloon bar in a hotel, without a street entrance, mainly for residents.
Shades	A basement bar. Rare.
Dive	Originally an illegal drinking den located underground (United States, 1882). now usually a basement Snack Bar.
Cocktail Bar / American Bar	Hotel bars, now tending to spread into public houses, sometimes taking over the place of the lounge under the title of Cocktail Lounge.
Source:
"Beer in Britain", The Times, 1960, page 69.

It’s incredible how long the term Four-Ale-Bar continued to be used. Mild hadn’t been 4d a quart since 1914, yet the expression was still in use almost half a century later.

I always considered names like Saloon Bar, Lounge Bar, Private Bar, etc. just to be synonyms for Lounge. Probably because the specific function of these rooms had fallen into misuse and been forgotten by the time I started drinking. There may have been different names on the door, but everyone just treated the rooms as part of the Lounge.

Next it’s the turn of the North:

Pub room names - Northern usage
Bar, Public Bar	As in the South.
Vaults	Originally a cellar for storing food or liquor; now on the ground floor—equivalent to the public bar. (Vault in Lancashire.)
Smoke Room	Northern and Midland equivalent of the saloon bar. There may be two: one for men only, the other (mixed) for both sexes.
Tap Room	A public bar. Sometimes a room reserved for playing games, without counter service.
Lounge / Parlour / Public Parlour / Bar Parlour	The best-furnished room.
Best Room / Best End	Colloquial names for the lounge.
Snug / Snuggery	Equivalent of the Southern bar parlour, but much more common. (Ireland only: one of a series of half-enclosed compartments within a bar.) Obsolescent.
News Room	An old-fashioned name for Tap Room, dating from the period when newspapers were supplied to customers.
Office Bar	(Midlands) An inner room without counter service, equivalent to the Southern bar parlour, generally located behind the scrvery or the hotel office.
Buffet Bar	North-Eastern variant of the lounge.  Not a snack bar.
Sitting Room	North-Eastern variant of the saloon bar.
First Class / Second Class	(Men's, Women's, Mixed.) Variants of the saloon and public bars, peculiar to the Carlisle State Management District.
Source:
"Beer in Britain", The Times, 1960, page 70.

I’m intrigued to see that the Carlisle State pubs had their own system of naming rooms. Not so surprising, as the scheme made radical changes to pub layouts, reducing the number of rooms and making decorations simpler.

You’ll note that there are considerable differences with southern practice. About the only names in common are Public Bar and Lounge. A couple of those terms I’ve never come across: News Room and Office Bar. And snug I only really know from Coronation Street.

The room names tally pretty well with what Mass Observation noted in 1930’s Bolton:

Vault — Vault, Public Bar, Saloon Bar.
Tap Room — News Room, Commercial Room.
Best Room — Music Room, Concert Room, Lounge, Parlour, Saloon, Commercial Room, Snug.
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 92 - 94.

Odd that Music Room and Concert Room aren’t mentioned in “Beer in Britain” as I have seen those names etched into pub glass.

I was rummaging through my brain trying to think of other names for pub rooms. I’m sure the list above isn’t exhaustive. Let me know if you can think of any.

The taproom and the lounge

Time for the remaining two classes of pub room: taproom and lounge.

"The taproom is the same price as the vault. The same simplicity—it is often like the kitchen of any small farmhouse in the villages outside Worktown. But unlike the vault it is entirely a sitting-room, wooden benches round the wall and wooden stools; unpolished wood tables, spittoons, dominoes. This is more of a club room than the vault. The same people, same clothes, same percentage caps and scarves, but few casuals dropping in. Casuals are somewhat resented if they do drop into the taproom. It would be bad form for a stranger to go in there for a drink. And he would probably notice that the regulars in there were not very pleased to see him."
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 105 - 106.

This fascinates me. The idea of  a second public bar type of room. Pretty much exactly like the vault, except with seats. And reserved for locals. The public bars my youthful boozing days in Leeds were more like the taprooms described here. Though there was no restriction on who went in. Quiet hostility to strangers isn't uncommon in pubs. Who hasn't walked through the door of a pub only for all conversations to stop and for everyone to turn and stare? It's happened to me on numerous occasions.

"In the lounge there are padded seats and chairs; a piano with a stool for the pianist; no standing. Aspidistras or other plants in 75 per cent; pictures on the wall, or modern wall decor; never stone floored, but lino, rubbercloth, etc. Generally a hearthrug. No games. Seldom a bookmaker's runner. Often adverts for non-alcoholic drinks. And always someone to bring you your drinks on a tray. You cannot see the bar from the lounge. In brief, the lounge is a large comfortable room with decorations such as may be found in any Worktown home, but on a large scale, on a middle-class level of comfort, with servant and service, everyone in smart clothes. You do not come to the lounge alone. If you do you are conspicuous. You come to the lounge with your social group, ready made, and sit at a table, having no especial intercourse with people at other tables. There is no sex division within the lounge. Each table tends to be a hetero-sexual group—though often these groups are exclusively of men or of women. Sixteen per cent of all pub-goers are women. About a third of all pub clients are in the lounges in pubs outside the town centre. The rest in the tap and vault. Average close on 45 per cent of the people in the lounge are women; in pubs where there are several lounges one may have 90 or more per cent women, it will have become a snug or bar parlour type, reserved for regular women in the same implicit way as the taproom is reserved for certain male regulars.

The saying "A woman's place is in the home" is still current in Worktown where 44 per cent of the adult women earn their own or their families' livings directly (over half these work in cotton mills). And the woman's place in the pub is that part of it which is a home from home, a better home from ordinary worker's home, where  — the only time in worker life in Worktown — you don't have to do any more than order someone else to serve your physiological need or wish. And, as usual, the woman's part is the one of cleanness, ashtrays, no random saliva, few or no spittoons. The vault is the place where men are men. In the lounge they are women's men, with collar studs. For that, as usual, they must pay another penny."
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 106 - 107.

Carpet. That was on the floor of the lounges I remember. Lino was just too Spartan by the 1970's.

Waiter service was the biggest difference between the lounge and the rest of the pub. Waiters, as far as I can tell, disappeared in the 1960's. A few pubs have retained them, but very few. I've only ever been in two myself. (One was in Grimsby, the other Wigan, which isn't far from Bolton.) It was an odd experience. I didn't really understand how it worked, ordering from the waiter and having my beer brought to my seat. If it had been more common, I might have been more comfortable with it.

I've read this sentence a dozen times and still don't understand what it means: "Each table tends to be a hetero-sexual group—though often these groups are exclusively of men or of women." The groups are mixed but exclusively either of men or women? That makes no sense.

"women's men, with collar studs": what does that mean? Silver-tongued seducers, I think. As we'll learn later, there was plenty of shagging going on in 1930's Bolton.