‘It’s a Small Little Pub,but Everybody Knew Everybody’: Pub Culture,Belonging and Social Change

Abstract

Public houses have long served an important social role in the United Kingdom, yet in recent decades the conditions under which they operate have changed dramatically. While research has examined adaptations in the pub sector, there is little analysis of how this relates to social change as experienced in the lives of individuals and communities. Pubs are therefore a useful topic of sociological inquiry. Using focus groups data, this article examines how people experience the changing form and function of pubs reveals insights into perceptions of social change. Findings show that participants were aware of how pub culture has changed over recent decades and that this was linked to perceptions of wider social and cultural changes in society. Talking about pub going was a means to express dynamic feelings of belonging and attachment, particularly where they arise at the intersection of personal life changes and wider social transformations.

Introduction

Public houses (‘pubs’) are spaces of social interaction that represent a focal point for communities (Cabras, 2011). Historically, they have served a number of social, cultural and economic functions (Lane, 2018) and are still recognised as ‘an important place where people from different backgrounds can meet and interact’ (Muir, 2009: 54). As such, they retain a significant amount of cultural visibility and prestige (Markham and Bosworth, 2016). Yet, while pubs can provide a ‘sense of focus’ for communities, the conditions under which pubs operate and the practices of pub going have undergone significant changes in recent decades (Andrews and Turner, 2012). Driven by multiple factors (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014), close to a quarter of pubs in the UK have closed permanently over the past 20 years, dropping from 60,800 in 2000 to 46,800 in 2020 (BBPA, 2022). The closure of pubs can be seen as part of a wider ‘death of the high street’ narrative prevalent in media and policy portrayals of the decline of such spaces that were once the social, cultural and economic hubs of local communities (Hubbard, 2017).

Because they are widely acknowledged as spaces where social connections can be made and maintained (Thurnell-Read, 2021a), and where habitual yet meaningful social interactions take place (Sandiford and Divers, 2019), the sociological study of pubs offers an avenue through which to examine perceptions of community, belonging and social change. This article explores how pubs and pub going are perceived by participants to have changed over time and how this contributes to ongoing debates about belonging and social change, particularly where they relate to reconfigurations of leisure practices in light of societal transformations eroding social connection and civic engagement (Putnam, 2000). Thus, the article contributes both an illustration of the sociological utility of studying pubs as unique social spaces and, further, adds to understandings of how seemingly mundane and habitual practices, such as pub going, can be used to apprehend experiences of dynamic social processes.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. The following section provides a general summary of the key changes to pubs and pub going over recent decades. This is followed by a section reflecting on the relative absence of pubs from sociological research and assesses their sociological relevance. Following a section outlining the methods used to gather data from nine focus groups, the findings are presented. The first findings section analyses reflections on the changing nature of pubs and the practice of pub going. Then, a second findings section analyses how pub talk affords opportunities for reflections on society and social change, often in ways that give expression to feelings of nostalgia and, for some, sadness. A concluding discussion sets out the contribution of the article in terms of augmenting understandings of belonging and social change before addressing the limitations of the study and outlining scope for future research.

Whose Round Is It? Pubs, Social Space and Social Change

The unique atmosphere and social function of the public house has long fascinated writers (Orwell, 1946) and social scientists (Mass Observation, 1943). Indeed, there remains a continued desire to render ‘the pub’ as an iconic feature of the cultural fabric of society and in so doing fix it as a timeless institution (Markham and Bosworth, 2016). However, both the operational nature and social role of pubs have changed dramatically, especially during the latter half of the 20th century. First, women became increasingly active participants in alcohol-based leisure (Hunt and Satterlee, 1987) and, in no small part the outcome of systemic and ongoing attempts by the brewery and pub sector to court female drinkers (Gutzke, 2005), female presence in previously male-dominated drinking spaces became common, though still contested (Leyshon, 2008). Importantly, for a generation of women, navigating the pleasures and risks (Nicholls, 2019) of public drinking became bound up with the expression of femininity. Second, processes of deindustrialisation cut through the communities that had sustained a landscape of local pubs primarily patronised by residents living and working in their immediate vicinity. Then, from the 1980s onwards, the growth of what became known as the Night Time Economy saw not just the number of drinking venues proliferate but their concentration in urban centres where ‘new cultures of intoxication’ based around a ‘calculated hedonism’ where a desire and cultural acceptance of hedonistic intoxication, involving drinking for the sake of getting drunk emerged (Szmigin et al., 2008). Furthered by successive waves of licensing liberalisation (Nicholls, 2013), alcohol-based leisure became central to the reimagination of post-industrial towns and cities (Hollands, 2002). While the ‘quiet night’ in the local pub retained appeal for some (Eldridge and Roberts, 2008; Thurnell-Read, 2017a), the ‘big night out’ involving heavy drinking across a series of venues, from pubs to bars to nightclubs, became a fixture of British youth culture (Roberts, 2015) and it is this spectacular youthful intoxication that continues to dominate academic research of drinking venues (Thurnell-Read and Fenton, 2022).

Alongside the emergence of the Night Time Economy, a number of other changes can be observed. Food became an increasingly important income stream with many pubs shifting from a ‘wet-led’ model towards one focused on the expanding demand for casual dining (Meers, 2021), while others relaunched as ‘gastropubs’ offering premium dining within a traditional pub aesthetics (Lane, 2018). Particularly following the Licensing Act 2003, which made it easier for venues such as cafes and restaurants to acquire alcohol licences, the emergence of hybrid spaces such as ‘alcohol-added’ cafes also further diversified the landscape of venues offering food and alcoholic drinks in different combinations (Thompson et al., 2018). At the same time, the growth of niche real ale and craft beer venues such as brewery tap rooms (Wallace, 2019), ‘micropubs’ (Hubbard, 2017) and events such as beer festivals (Thurnell-Read, 2017a, 2017b) and ‘real ale trails’ (Thurnell-Read et al., 2021) further diversified the drinking landscape. Finally, the biggest shift has been towards domestic alcohol consumption meaning that, while many maintain a ‘traditional drinking’ habitus focused on evenings and weekend visits to pubs, a ‘home drinking’ habitus involving ‘consumption of wine in regular, moderate amounts throughout the week, often with meals and as part of domestic and family life’ typifies an increasing number of people’s relationships with alcohol (Brierley-Jones et al., 2014: 1059).

What emerges from these transformative decades is a heterogeneous picture where the still culturally venerated ideal of ‘the pub’ often obscures the sheer variety of drinking venues, styles of drinking and associated social interactions that take place in such spaces. While social historians (Gutzke, 1994; Haydon, 1994; Jennings, 2007) have examined the gradual evolution of pubs as social, cultural and economics spaces, where sociologists have studied pubs they have tended to focus on particular venues (Goode and Anderson, 2015; Smith, 1985; Watson and Watson, 2012) as social spaces in which divisions and tensions relating to social class (Smith, 1983) and gender (Hunt and Satterlee, 1987) can be observed and understood. While sporadic engagement of sociologists with pubs and pub going has been insightful, the way in which pubs and pub culture have changed over time remains unanalysed and poorly linked to wider social changes and transformations.

Thinking Sociologically about Pubs

This article suggests that pubs are sociologically useful for understanding experiences of social change and wider social transformations. Pubs represent important and dynamic social spaces, not least in being prime examples of what Oldenburg (1989) has termed ‘third spaces’, those other than work and home, where people meet and interact in varied and socially significant ways. There are, then, several features or qualities of pubs that make them a fertile subject for sociological investigation. First, the continuity of physical presence and operation of many pubs, often possessing traceable histories going back decades if not centuries, means they are enduring and relatively stable reference points within specific geographical locations. The histories of particular pubs can live long in the memory of local residents. There is therefore a balance of continuity and change that makes for fruitful sociological analysis. Second, in being dispersed across rural, suburban and urban areas throughout the UK, pubs are not a uniquely rural or urban phenomenon. While many pubs, especially those owned and managed in the vast estates owned by the sector dominating chain ‘PubCos’, may conform to a familiar, even standardised, aesthetic and ambiance, that conformity is also tempered by the idiosyncrasies of specific locations and contexts. Third, while pub going has a continued cross-class appeal (Le Roux et al., 2008), pubs are also spaces of spatial and social divisions with gender (Campbell, 2000; Leyshon, 2008), in particular, but also sexuality (Emslie et al., 2017), ethnicity and religion (Valentine et al., 2010) and age (Thurnell-Read, 2021a) critical to understanding both who uses pubs and how they are used, experienced and perceived by different groups. Pubs can, indeed must, be viewed as contested spaces within which wider social differences are played out and from which shifting allegiances may be inferred. Fourth, pub going and pub-based drinking is rule-bound (Fox, 2005), learnt behaviour into which a person is socialised, which is passed from one generation to the next and structured by both continuity and change between generations (Thurnell-Read and Fenton, 2022). At the same time, transgression is a feature of many drinking contexts, meaning the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in pubs is open to dynamic changes and generational conflicts. Fifth, and finally, pubs and pub going are part of mundane or quotidian social life, embedded in everyday social practices of leisure and sociability and in which key life events such as birthdays, weddings, retirements and wakes are celebrated or commemorated. Pubs are spaces in which the unremarkable ‘everyday matters’ that, following Back (2015: 834), offer ‘the opportunity to link the smallest story to the largest social transformation’ take place. A sociology of pub going and pub culture is, therefore, part of the wider development of the sociology of everyday life where a focus on the everyday practices ‘allows us to view social change not simply as a top-down process generated by “extraordinary” events’ but, as May (2011: 367) suggests, as something resulting from the ‘ordinary’ activities by which people ‘negotiate their way through or around social structures’.

The article therefore finds commonality with recent studies where specific social spaces are used as a way of gaining insights into how wider social issues, such as gentrification and multiculturalism, are felt and experienced as lived realities. Involving as they do a diversity of people and groups, semi-public spaces such as the cafes studied by Jones et al. (2015: 646) are ‘co-constitutive of wider social change, interaction and formations of belonging’. Similarly, the venue central to Jackson’s (2020: 530) ethnographic study of a North London bowling league is a ‘spatial and social context’, which is ‘a product of the various practices and histories of league bowlers’ that can, therefore, be appreciated as part of ‘dynamic processes of belonging and becoming’. As the analysis presented below illustrates, pubs are here used to shed light on experiences of social change and feelings of belonging and attachment, which change and shift across the life course. Because many pubs are physically fixed in local communities, they become reference points for how those communities are changing and may, in turn, reflect what Mulligan (2015: 349) has described as ‘an underlying desire to create and project a sense of belonging to communities of place’.

A case can be made, then, for pubs being a useful sociological subject and an important referent in understanding both lived social experiences and perceptions of social change. A contribution of the article is, therefore, to demonstrate how pubs and pub culture can be viewed as important social spaces where changing formations of belonging, attachment and detachment are played out.

Methods and Context

The data presented in this article represent one element of a larger mixed-methods project examining the role that pubs play in tackling loneliness and social isolation in society commissioned by Campaign to End Loneliness, a London-based charity involved in research and advocacy for those at risk of loneliness in society. While this wider research undertaking involved a survey of pub sector workers, semi-structured interviews with pub trade staff and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders both within the pub sector and from related charities, the analysis presented here draws exclusively on a fourth strand of data involving focus groups with various community groups in varied urban, suburban and rural locations (see Thurnell-Read, 2021b). The focus groups were conducted in July and August 2019 and involved a total of 86 participants, with participant recruitment facilitated by Neighbourly, an organisation that links business, charities and community groups, as well as through pre-existing community organisations and networks. The primary inclusion criteria related to being individuals or groups who might be at risk of loneliness and social isolation. This meant that eight of the 10 focus groups were specifically convened with predominantly older participants and this, in retrospect, also informs the following analysis, which considers memories of pub culture over the life course.

Being a pub goer was not stipulated as an inclusion criterion, however in practice nearly all participants had some current or, at least, extensive previous experiences of pub going. One of the 10 focus groups involved four young adults with various learning disabilities and is not included in the present analysis given its focus on social change over time and specifically on the reflections of older pub goers. The remaining nine focus groups, therefore, involved 82 participants of various ages and social backgrounds. There were more men than women and most participants were white. An exception to this was two focus groups specifically involving members of the British Caribbean community in South London and in the West Midlands, recruited to ensure greater diversity within the research. Another London-based focus group involved several participants from the Nepalese community and two other focus groups included a single person of Asian heritage who, in all cases, was a member of the pre-existing community group rather than the result of attempts by the author to recruit minority ethnic participants specifically. No specific efforts were made to recruit participants of specific sexual minorities and sexual orientation and identity, as well as relationship status, were not asked of participants. Given the focus on older age in the original research commission, participants were predominantly in their 50s, 60s and 70s, although some were in their 80s and even early 90s. A number of the focus groups also involved younger participants who were, for example, the adult daughter of a group member or community group or care workers in their 30s and 40s who were present and also involved in discussions.

Each focus group followed the same initial structure. Participants were asked to introduce themselves and share an initial thought about their experiences of pubs and pub going. This led to more detailed discussion of positive and negative experiences of pub going and, where it had yet to be raised in the course of discussion already, a question relating to perceptions of how pubs and pub culture have changed over the course of participants’ lives. Key questions relating to particular barriers to pub going and, alternatively, facilities or services that enabled social connection in pubs, specifically, and in all public spaces, more generally, then formed the latter stages of the focus group discussion. A final ‘closing circle’ then gave each participant the chance to add one final thought or reflection on anything addressed in the discussion or on matters or concerns that had not, until then, been addressed.

All focus groups were audio recorded, then transcribed by a professional transcription service. The author then made their own thematic analysis of the transcriptions, coding for recurring themes. In preparation of this article, a further recoding was made in order to regroup several codes to better align with the analytical focus on memories and recollections of past pub going. This was an important step as the analysis conducted for the original research commission largely focused on recent experiences, present conditions and future concerns. However, substantial sections of the transcripts, where an initial opening questions relating to past experiences of pub going, intended to put participants at ease and establish some context for further discussion, had fostered lengthy and nuanced reflections on the past and on changes lived through over decades, which fell outside of the remit of the original commission but which here form the analytical basis of the following discussion.

Findings

‘It’s as if Everything Is Changing, Sometimes for the Better and Sometimes Not’: Reflections on the Changing Nature of Pubs and Pub Going

All the focus groups involve extended discussions about past pub going experience and, in particular, about local pubs and their character and history. Even participants who rarely visited pubs traded information and opinions about local pubs, often in ways that revealed an intimate connection to the local area. For example, in a focus group in Greater Manchester, a discussion centred on the pubs and clubs where participants ‘used to go dancing’ in their youth, which were remembered for their ‘sociable’ atmosphere, while a participant in the East Midlands Market Town focus group asserted that: ‘We used to have all these pubs because [the town] used to be the main route, and it’s a market town.’ Knowledge about local pubs, then, was presented as a means of making attachments to place. Notably, though, these reflections were nearly always accurately aware of changes over time. Thus, the former group also noted how the pub where they used to go dancing had ‘just recently shut down and been turned into flats’ and the latter group debated how most pubs had shifted into offering dining or accommodation, and that one pub in particular had ‘always suffered’.

A considerable portion of each focus group involved participants sharing memories of pub going earlier in their lives, particularly in the formative years from late adolescence to early adulthood. There was considerable nostalgia for the layout and ambiance of ‘spit and sawdust boozers’, pubs characterised as having a simple level of decor and basic facilities, where memories of materiality of pubs in the past invoked smoky rooms and sticky floors. A reference for many was the presence of games such as darts, bowls, dominoes and skittles being common in pubs in the past but now all but absent. As such, a female participant in the Manchester Suburb group reflected that ‘we played a lot of darts and cards and dominoes, so, there was always that activity going on’. Similarly, a participant in the East Midlands Suburb group said that ‘in my 30s and 40s, you went to a village pub and there was invariably a bowling green at the side of it’ and acknowledged that while that had been lost, pubs had now ‘picked up a different sort of trade. It’s as if everything is changing, sometimes for the better and sometimes not.’

Many participants provided perceptive insights into how the form and function of pubs had changed in recent decades. In the West Midlands Suburb group, for instance, one participant reflected how the local pubs he used to frequent in his youth were all ‘run by families’ and were places where ‘it’s a small little pub, but everybody knew everybody’. Nowadays, in contrast, pubs were ‘run by staff’ and with frequent managerial changes, meaning that when you ‘go in there, it’s like going in new again’. In a similar vein, the group in South London discussed how their neighbourhood had changed from having a high street where ‘every second door was a pub’ to being where the only remaining pubs focused on food without offering the convivial drinking spaces they recalled from their youth. Here, processes of gentrification reshaping the area were felt in the loss of such spaces where one participant recollected how his brother and their friends ‘every one of them would buy a bottle of spirit and put it on the table and they’ll start up the conversation anyway’.

The move away from such venues was therefore not uniformly lamented and improved standards of service and decor were frequently commented on positively. For instance, one participant in the Greater Manchester group suggested that:

There’s a happy medium with the pubs as regards modernising and leaving them as they are, in that you do want them to look clean, and you perhaps want them – the seating upholstery not looking as though 10,000 pints had been spilled on it, but without – there’s a way of doing it without losing any atmosphere that they have. Sometimes they just rip everything out and spoil it, and other times it just virtually sinks into the ground.

An example of this ambivalent acceptance of the modernisation of pubs often related to the service of food and the trend in recent decades towards casual dining becoming more commonly and frequently practised. An example of this is a participant in West Midlands Town group who, being a widower in his late 70s, expressed an appreciation for modern pubs as places where a meal could be eaten in relative comfort and where service standards were now more professional and welcoming than in pubs of the past. She reflected that ‘I don’t mean fawning all over you, but nicely served, being polite to them and expecting them to be polite back to you, you know. And food nicely served, I don’t think you can beat it.’ Thus, while many participants spoke of food-led pubs not being ‘real’ pubs, they also often praised such venues as being more welcoming and enticing, particularly for female participants as they entered middle and older age (see Thurnell-Read, 2021a).

Further contrasts were made by participants between the more homogeneous male-dominated pub patronage of the past and the increasing acceptance of women into pub culture of recent decades. A participant in the Manchester Suburb group noted that in her youth pubs were ‘segregated’ with some areas of the pub being spaces ‘you used to see the men playing darts [but] women were never allowed in there’, at which point another participant, also an elderly female, agreed, adding ‘you was afraid of going into that bit [of the pub]’. This development was typically framed as a generational change. For instance, one female participant in the Greater Manchester group explained that ‘women didn’t go into pubs in my generation. You just didn’t do it’, while, similarly, a 78-year-old participant in the East Midlands Suburb group observed that: ‘I grew up in the late 40s and 50s when drinking was almost entirely restricted to men.’ In both cases, other focus groups participants were quick to concur, often by adding that women who did drink in pubs might draw judgement and have their respectability questioned. Indeed, another participant in the Greater Manchester group took some amusement in recalling an era when entering a pub as an unaccompanied female risked being assumed a ‘scarlet woman’ and receiving unwanted and ‘threatening’ male attention. As such, many participants can be seen as representing a generation of women for whom pub going, if it did take place, was pressured to be a group activity (Hunt and Satterlee, 1987). Indeed, one participant recalled drinking in pubs a lot with her ‘hubby’ but very little following being widowed in her late 30s, primarily because she felt conspicuous as an unaccompanied female pub goer.

While references to how pubs had become more mixed in terms of gender might suggest a development towards greater inclusivity, pubs were in various ways felt to be less welcoming for participants in later life. A common theme relating to the changing social composition of pub customers was the shift from intergenerational community pubs to venues dominated by groups of younger mixed-gender drinkers. Typical of this, a participant in the West Midlands City group asserted that:

They’ve become more of a young person’s playground. So, maybe for an older person, they might not find that they want to be in this environment because it gets a bit rowdy and there’s lads here just getting drunk, whereas I remember back in the day, the pub was where men used to go after work. You’d find people in there chilling, reading a paper, drinking beer, but it’s changed a bit.

For this participant, a British Caribbean woman in her early 70s, modern pubs were out of keeping with her tastes in terms of comportment and manners, with swearing and impolite behaviour putting her off many venues.

A recurring element of this theme was invoking the atmosphere of pubs in the past as being more gentle and respectable. In contrast, a shift from regular to ‘binge’ pub going, often felt to be unappealing and off-putting, was characterised by the proliferation of youth-led venues where, as one participant in the Southeast London group explained, ‘youngsters nowadays, they drink the shots, they drink the alcopops like the WKDs and the cider and to be honest, their temperament’s not the same’. Across focus groups, then, one of the most common complaints relating to contemporary pubs was that they were seen as being, in the words of a South London Group participant, ‘too loud, too noisy, too aggressive’. Similarly, a participant in the East Midlands Market Town group firmly stated that she ‘cannot stand the bad language. That will turn me off and I will leave.’ Important, then, was a sense that pubs of the past upheld different standards of moderation and social comportment at odds with the perceived preferences of contemporary drinkers (Thurnell-Read, 2017a).

A final example of changes to the nature of pub culture discussed in the focus groups was offered by two Nepalese men, members of the Southeast London focus group. As retired Ghurkhas having served in the British Army, they recounted how during their army days they would drink in pubs with soldiers from other regiments. Later, after leaving the army and starting families, their social activities shifted to at first emerging, and then more established, Nepalese community spaces. They spoke of pubs being a way of fitting in with fellow soldiers in their earlier life but, later on, of preferring the sense of familiarity and belonging offered by venues, often former pubs converted into restaurants offering Nepalese food, where cultural events and community gatherings were hosted.

‘Sometimes Your Friends Don’t See You for God Knows How Long’: Reflections on Society and Social Change

The personal reflections on pubs and pub going explored above demonstrate both a significant insight and a degree of ambivalence on the part of participants. Focus groups frequently slipped into more general conversations concerning an apparent loss of social connections relating to changing sociable dispositions linked to reconfigurations of leisure, work and family affordances and constraints and, related to this, a perceived decline of local communities. Beyond simply offering insights into how participants understood changes to pubs and pub going, key findings, as such, also illuminate the ways in which wider social upheavals are experienced and perceived.

Many focus group participants reflected nostalgically on an earlier time in their lives when they were more socially active and society was felt to be more socially minded. Such lamentations often alluded to the speakers’ feeling of a passing away of a period where their social life flourished but also a sense of declining levels of social engagement in society more generally. At least some of the nostalgia inflecting some discussion was, therefore, both for more sociable days as individuals but also a time they felt that communities were more socially connected than they are today. For example, in the West Midlands Town group, one participant suggested that ‘a lot of people are creatures of habit, they do the same thing on Monday and do the same thing next Monday’, while another felt that ‘there’s a lot of people who will sit [at home] and have a bottle of wine with their meal and they’re quite happy with that’ meaning they ‘don’t get the social side’ and ‘miss all the local gossip’. Participants in this group felt people had become more insular and less likely to engage in spontaneous social interaction. Likewise, participants in the West Midlands City group agreed that there was a sense that many of their friends and family members were prioritising their work and family lives over the sorts of spontaneous social interaction that was typified by the pub going of their youth. One participant summarised that:

There’s also people’s busy lives, so whether you’re the person who’d ordinarily go to the pub or you’re the person who doesn’t really, you’re so busy doing everything else that you’re doing, sometimes your friends don’t see you for God knows how long, your relatives don’t see you for however long. So imagine the people who are at home already feel isolated. You’re not even giving them a second thought.

Similar sentiments were expressed in the Southeast London group, where the following exchange again invokes a loss of social spontaneity:

R1: No, for me I plan ahead because I work nearly seven days a week, so between the three different jobs I’ve got, so I plan well in advance, and usually all my holidays are well planned in advance. It’s like [what is] in the pipeline for 2021 so for me even an evening out for me with a few close friends is planned well in advance, even to do shopping trips. I have a little diary, a little black book, write it down, then it’s in, I know I’ve got it done, yeah.

R2: And they have calendars don’t they, and put it in.

R1: We all have to plan.

R3: Because it’s sometimes finding the time to be able to get everyone at the same time. Whereas years ago it was just, there wasn’t a care in the world so you could just go out.

In such reflections there is an emphasis on spontaneous social occasions of the past, which took place between established communities of regulars within local pubs. In contrast, social life was seen to be now increasingly scheduled within the family unit. Indeed, participant comments that relate to an enduring desire for sociable pub going, which is undermined by either an individual’s inability to ‘find the time’ or the difficulty of coordinating dissipated friends to agree a time and place to meet, relate well to sociological observations on the supposed ‘time squeeze’, where feelings of ‘harriedness’ linked to difficulties of coordinating social practices with others (Southerton and Tomlinson, 2005). Interestingly, many retired participants spoke of a mismatch in time availability where they had an abundance of time during the week, in contrast to working age family members such as their adult children who could only visit them on occasional weekends and public holidays. While a full analysis of the implications of these temporal aspects of changing pub going practices is beyond the scope of this article, there is some suggestion in recent research that competing and overlapping leisure rhythms might explain how different groups gain different pleasures from pub-based leisure (Thurnell-Read et al., 2021).

Following on from this, one of the main links between reflections specific to pubs and pub going and more general perceptions of society and social change related to a perceived decline of either local communities or of society more generally. For example, a participant in the Southeast London group explained that while they still went to the pub, they had tended to shift to day time trips focused on having meals with friends and planning to return home before early evening. This was framed against a more general depiction of risk and danger. She said that:

As I’ve got older and I see about more knife crime and gun crime and kids killing kids [. . .] more for the fear of what’s going on outside once you leave the house [. . .] it’s more about the social, how the social society is now, than what it was for me when I was 15 and 16. I could walk down the street at 15, 16. I wouldn’t have a care in the world.

This theme of increased risk and a loss of trust in society was apparent in a number of focus group discussions.

In certain locations, focus group discussions, notably those in urban and suburban areas, emphasised local communities as being in decline. Closed pubs that were boarded up and left to deteriorate were described as ‘sad’, ‘sorry’ or ‘ugly’ and were clearly felt by many to be a distressing reminder of neighbourhood change. A participant in the Southeast London group observed that:

The pubs that I’ve seen so far in [local area] and just, it’s, it looks like it’s so isolated, so you’re abandoned, no one’s in there. The only time something social is happening is usually a Friday night, but other than those, other nights it’s empty.

Boarded up pubs, many of which were specifically remembered as settings of convivial gatherings and as loci of strong feelings of place attachment in the past, were now an unwanted physical reminder of social change and community decline – the very opposite of the spectacles of community identified by Back (2015: 832) as being important to how many communities evoke a sense of place and belonging out of the materiality of everyday localities. Indeed, memories of how a particular area of the town or city used to bustle with life but had since fallen into decline drew out a mood of despondency in several groups.

Running through these comments is the implication that social interactions were, in the past, more frequent, more varied and predicated on social connection, conviviality and trust, which some now felt to be lacking. In contrast to occasional meetings with immediate family, acknowledged as important by the majority of participants, what was felt to be lost were the social spaces of the past where friends, family, acquaintances and strangers all mixed together. Thus, pubs of the past were evidently valued, even idealised, for offering meaningful social spaces akin to the ‘third spaces’ celebrated by Oldenburg (1989) and the social capital the loss of which was lamented by Putnam (2000).

Such is reflected by an elderly male participant in the West Midlands Suburb group who followed his account of the decline of pub going in the later years of his life with a notably sombre description of the lack of social activity in the area where he now resided in a retirement apartment. He said that:

Well, I tell you something, round where I live you couldn’t go and meet anybody because before 10 o’clock, nobody surfaces and after 5 o’clock everybody’s missing and you don’t see anybody. There’s no traffic. There’s no buses. There’s no nothing . . . And it is so absolutely deadly quiet. I can sit there – I mean I haven’t been out the house now for about eight months isn’t it? And I can tell you, I can sit in my lounge and look through and it’s just houses. There’s another development, two bungalows opposite, like, and never see nobody.

This final extract is telling for being punctuated with absences of people, of buses, of bustle and social action. Notably, then, its elegiac tone perhaps evokes feelings both of a life winding towards its end and also a form of social life now replaced by another.

Concluding Discussion

The findings analysed above demonstrate that talking about past and present pub going practices was both a means for participants to explore feelings of local belonging and place attachment, in the process invoking a range of at times strong feelings and sentiments. Similar to observations made by Jackson (2020: 519), a sense of community and belonging is not solely ‘achieved through a narrowly defined set of organised practices’ but is felt as a mood or atmosphere centred on feelings of conviviality, albeit here those that largely took place in the past. Talking about pub going, then, was a means to explore and express dynamic feelings of belonging and attachment, particularly where they arise at the intersection of personal life changes and wider social transformations. Importantly, these discussions were suffused with reflections on how pubs, and the local communities they served, had changed and how these changes related to wider trends in society relating to work, leisure and family life.

This analysis makes several contributions, which are outlined in turn. First, while the article contends that pubs are perceived by many as a manifestation of the changing character of both local communities and of wider society, rather than simple nostalgia, these recollections span a multifaceted and layered account of the changing role of pubs and pub going in people’s lives and were often loaded with emotions such as sadness, affording insights into perceptions of community developments and social change. From these recollections it has been possible to appreciate the nuanced reflections of participants who were able and willing to narrate both changes across their own life course and insights into wider social upheavals. This concurs with previous work establishing the social value of pubs (Cabras, 2011) but adds a degree of ambivalence where a nostalgia for the past is moderated by an acceptance of advances in pub culture, not least those bringing greater levels of service and a more inclusive or at least less male-dominated atmosphere. Such developments were recognised and welcomed by nearly all participants.

Second, the discussions analysed illustrate the multifaceted and dynamic nature of social life and belonging. For many participants, a busy pub represented one of the most joyful manifestations of grounded place-based communities (Mulligan, 2015), where social activity often contrasted with ‘sitting at home’, invoked as an image of a more atomistic, less integrated society and an age in which civic participation is eroded (Putnam, 2000). For many, pubs have retained a particular social and cultural value, at least in theory, as places in which meaningful attachments to place and community can be maintained (Sandiford and Divers, 2019). As Buffel and Phillipson (2019: 995) suggest, where social change impacts the forms of place attachment forged across the life course of long-term residents, ‘older people’s feelings about the past often reflected a sense of exclusion from the present, especially when they experience community redevelopment as something beyond their control’. Indeed, several of the recollections examined above are a good illustration of May’s (2017) assertion that nostalgic reflections of the past serve to negotiate, add vitality to and ‘warm up’ connections to the present as part of the process of reshaping personal belonging in the present. Following Neal et al. (2019: 78), this illustrates how involvement in social leisure activities engages people with places and where ‘being together’ with others involves negotiations of attachments shaped by the ‘materialities of meeting spaces and the costs of participation’.

Third, the findings represent an illustration of how personal and social change are experienced and perceived. Pub closures were experienced as a manifestation of a loss of community and mirror Lewis’s (2016) analysis of response to the social changes threatening two social spaces in a rapidly changing area of Manchester, where narratives of loss relating to community decline are integral to how long-term residents negotiate tensions brought by regeneration and social change. For participants in the present study, talking about pubs of the past appeared to involve lamenting the loss of a previous age characterised by certainty where the simple sociability of the past was contrasted with a present in which both personal well-being and community cohesion were far from certain. Thus, as Strangleman (2012: 422) suggests, ‘nostalgia almost always tells us about the present condition of the person rather than the past, which superficially at least is the object of discussion’. Importantly, older residents face the loss of public social spaces with ‘a range of negative responses’ (Torres, 2020: 17) but also do so as active agents meaning that although loss features prominently in narratives so too do adaptation strategies and acceptance of the benefits of social change (Weil, 2019). Notably, then, few participants came anywhere close to arguing that the changes observed in pubs should not be taking place. Rather, they appeared to understand that social change was inevitable and that in different ways they were affected by or benefited from such developments.

Finally, a number of limitations of the study must be acknowledged. Although conducting focus groups around the country and in a variety of rural, urban and suburban locations allowed for a varied range of participants, and there were some stark contrasts between research locations in terms of relative affluence and deprivation, it was not possible to specifically address socio-economic conditions in each location. Data therefore capture participant perceptions of local areas rather than actual contexts. This means that longitudinal or ethnographic accounts of pubs and social change in specific locations may be a potential avenue for future research where added depth to analysis could further unpack the privileges and inequalities evident in neighbourhood resources, which sustain and protect social capital and connection (Cattell, 2004). Additionally, the general composition of participants was based on the original research remit of a study on the role of pubs, loneliness and social isolation. With access to groups being gained through existing community organisations and their gatekeepers, there is a likelihood that the sample favours those who were both willing to talk about pubs and pub going and who had some prior investment in their local community through, for example, being an active participant in a pre-existing social group or community activities. However, that most participants in the research were older in terms of age is novel and, given the over-emphasis on youth in much scholarship on alcohol and drinking culture (Thurnell-Read and Fenton, 2022), provides valuable insights into how pubs and pub-based leisure and, more generally, belonging and social change are experienced and understood.