When an Israeli property developer took a wrecking ball to the Carlton Tavern pub in Kilburn earlier this year, little can they have imagined that Westminster Council would insist that they rebuild the 1920s boozer exactly as it was, brick by precious brick.
But the pub in question wasn’t any old pub. It was due to be Grade II-listed by Historic England (formerly English Heritage), as one of a select number of surviving interwar public houses to receive the status, the rest of which – thankfully still standing – were announced on Friday. The Carlton might have gone (for now), but 21 other pubs from the same era have now been safely protected by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport as precious examples of the “improved pub” movement that flourished between the wars.
Characterised by folksy arts and crafts architecture and a bigger variety of spaces, including restaurants, lounge bars and expansive beer gardens, the improved pub was an attempt by breweries to lure a more respectable kind of clientele. With improved facilities and a more open-plan layout allowing easier surveillance from behind the bar, it was hoped this new species of refined pub might attract women and families, and help to shed the Victorian pub’s image as a sordid den of drunkenness.
The finest such establishment on the list is Birmingham’s majestic Black Horse (upgraded to II*), a stately pile built in the “Brewer’s Tudor” style in 1930, which Historic England’s experts say has “no equal in size, ambition or quality”. Not even JD Weatherspoon’s palatial pretensions can match the ambition of Davenport’s, the Birmingham brewery behind this grand confection. The company had already made its name in the 1920s with its “Beer at Home” delivery service, so its needed an extra lure to prise people away from the comfort of drinking in their own homes. The result is a fairytale mansion of beer, imbued with a sense of occasion and escapism, with vaulted ceilings encrusted with richly carved wooden mouldings and grandly-scaled rooms for dances and meetings for local societies.
The Berkeley Hotel in Scunthorpe had equally lofty ambitions. It was commissioned by landlady Edith Kennedy, who developed the pub in an unusual partnership with the Samuel Smith brewery in the late 1930s and decorated it herself with a fashionable Art Deco look. “Allied to the skill of architect and builder,” declared the local newspaper approvingly, when the pub opened, “is a woman’s taste.”
It is an archetypal “roadhouse” pub, a type of establishment that proliferated along Britain’s expanding trunk roads and dual carriageways in the 1930s, featuring huge car parks, cocktail lounges and gardens. Inside its unassuming brick shell, the Berkeley is a heady brew of arched openings and doorways with leaded fanlights, swooshing ceiling mouldings and a sweeping fan-like staircase. The statutory listing citation praises the “imposing composition” and its “numerous architectural style influences,” somehow managing to incorporate “Neo-Georgian, Moderne, Art Deco, and Oriental to successful effect”. It is a magnificently gaudy eyeful.
Others on the list are more workaday affairs, revealing the emergence of a particular house style among some of the bigger breweries. The east London Truman brewery’s architect, A E Sewell, was responsible for over 50 pubs between 1910 and 1939, six of which make it on to the list, from the hipster hangout of Columbia Road’s Royal Oak, to Stoke Newington’s Rose and Crown. Both still sport the brewery’s trademark ceilings made of creamy Vitrolite panels, a synthetic material used to encourage better hygiene and defy the popular image of the pub as a murky establishment, along with simple wooden panelled walls, rejecting the opulence of the turn of the century gin palaces.
The Golden Heart in Spitalfields also graces the list, a pub that stands on the corner just down the road from Truman’s Black Eagle brewery on Brick Lane, still emblazoned with the rare Truman’s neon sign. Stomping ground of YBAs Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas in the 1990s, its landlady, Sandra Esquilant, was voted one of the hundred most influential people in the art world in 2002. “What the Ivy is to showbiz stars,” trumpeted the Observer, “the Golden Heart is to artists”. Its glamorous clientele thankfully didn’t change the down-to-earth interior, which remains mostly intact from the 1930s as one of the best-surviving examples of the brewery’s no-nonsense house style.
When Truman’s strayed outside London, it had more highfalutin plans. The Station in Surrey, completed in 1935, was one of its most ambitions and expensive pubs, built for the well-heeled residents of the commuter belt. Another example of the lavish Brewer’s Tudor style, around 20 specialist firms were employed to build and decorate the pub, and no expense was spared. From plaster wall panels decorated with birds and oak trees, to the wooden roof beams, traditionally constructed in pegged English oak and carved with laughing or grimacing faces, it is a rich evocation of “merrie olde England” of which a tipsy William Morris would have been proud.
These newly listed pubs represent a small fraction of the 5,000 or more pubs that were built during the interwar years. It was a particularly fruitful period that compelled architect Basil Oliver to publish a detailed retrospective, The Renaissance of the English Public House, in 1949, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of the British boozer.
He notes that, before the first world war, new pub buildings were rare because of the “misguided idea … that to improve buildings was to encourage drinking”. By contrast, he observes that the prohibitionist urge actually triggered a great resurgence in pub design and building: when the state began to run the brewing and pub industry in Carlisle in 1916, “it permitted unhampered experiments in many directions, but especially in the evolution of the public house”.
Oliver goes on to describe the particular features of the interwar pub, seeing the demise of the tap room and the rise of the saloon bar, with its “faint suggestion of superiority” making it “the haunt of the ‘toffs’ (or would-be toffs)”. Smoking rooms become equally popular, while the “Private Bar and Bar Parlour … are equally indicative of their purpose – private transactions and intimate conversations – and from being popular with the fair sex have virtually become, in many houses, a Women’s Bar.”
The listing announcement comes at a precarious time for the future of the pub. The British Beer and Pub Association estimates that around 30 pubs are closing down each week, a result of changing drinking habits, rising land values and the fact that pubs can currently be converted to another use without planning permission. The Campaign for Real Ales (Camra) has launched a List your Local campaign, encouraging people to nominate pubs to be listed by their local authorities as “assets of community value”. The status doesn’t prevent conversion or demolition, but it gives the community a right to bid to buy the site if it comes up for sale, triggering a moratorium of six months to help them raise funds, a useful delaying tactic which is often enough to deter potential developers. Camra says its campaign has seen over 800 pubs listed to date.
The rising interest in the now-endangered pub has spurred Historic England on to expand its work in the field. The interwar pub project is one of a number of research strands, from 19th and 20th-century pubs in Leeds and Bristol, to the next big project looking at post-war pubs. With many built on council estates, they are a severely threatened building type, facing conversion and demolition across the country. If you have a favourite post-war pub, Historic England wants to hear from you.
Do you have a favourite post-war pub you’d like to tell us about? You can take part in our GuardianWitness assignment