Context 165 - August 2020

26 C O N T E X T 1 6 5 : A U G U S T 2 0 2 0 the decline of manual labour, the advent of the mobile phone and the rise of social media have completely changed these dynamics. The Victorian pub was highly stratified socially and the hierarchy of rooms that became established in the 19th century still remained the norm until the 1960s. The public bar was the most simply appointed and still the domain of the working man, who would pay a copper or two less than in the ‘better’ rooms which went under names like saloon, smoke room, lounge or private bar. A seismic change has come over pubs, starting in the early 1960s, with the amalgamation of rooms and the removal of internal partitions. The 2020 The Railway Hotel, Faversham, Kent, plan of 1898. A typical late-Victorian or early 20th-century pub arrangement. The four pub rooms – a public bar on the corner, two private lounges and a lounge – cluster around the central servery (Photo: Railway Hotel Collection) The Victoria, Durham, was built in 1899 with a small booth for take-home sales, connected to the servery through a tiny hatch. It goes by the unusual but by no means unique name of ‘family department’ (Photo: Geoff Brandwood) The Loggerheads, Shrewsbury, had a gents-only room until the end of 1975. Does the inscription perhaps suggest a certain wistfulness about its passing? (Photo: Geoff Brandwood) norm is a single room or spaces that are fully interconnected. A particular casualty has been off-sales com- partments, often called the ‘jug and bottle’ (and variants thereof). In the 1950s and 1960s, and even into the 1970s, the pub was often the place where people went for take-home supplies. In the early 1960s this all began to change with the inexorable rise of supermarkets, which benefited from more liberal regulations on selling alco- hol. Pub off-sales facilities simply disappeared, incorporated into an adjacent part of the pub, or perhaps converted to kitchen use or storage. The openness of pubs today would surprise customers from 60 or more years ago. So would the treatment of pub glazing. For genera- tions the world of the pub was considered as rather louche, slightly risqué, as least by large proportions of the middle-class populace. In any case, those using them expected a degree of privacy, so windows and doors had etched glass to form a veil between the inner and outer worlds. In the past few decades clear glass has become standard, leading to the destruction of great amounts of fine Victorian and early 20th-century glass. It is often said that this is to make pubs more ‘women-friendly’ and show that the pub is not necessarily some dangerous, male-dominated place. At any rate this has had a profound effect on the appearance and character of the pub. Another change that concerns women has a pre- cise date. It was not uncommon for some urban