Public House
A major new history of the London pub, explored through multiple voices and perspectives and edited by David Knight and Cristina Monteiro.
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For centuries, the London pub has been a place of social fermentation where all manner of people have come to drink, think, share stories, and company. Surviving plagues, bombs, fires, and floods, they have borne witness to wakes, weddings, and the writing of world-changing manifestos. London’s pubs have provided the social and architectural infrastructure for civic life to thrive with a remarkably varied mix of spaces for meeting, making up, breaking up, and cultural conviviality.
From opulent former Gin Palaces to humble Taverns to Micropubs and community-owned pubs, the story of London’s more than 3,500 pubs tells the story of the city itself. This book celebrates the incredible diversity, design, and stories of London’s public houses. Tracing the development of the pub as an enduring institution through societal upheavals the book will connect changes in pubs with wider social and political movements; filled with original photography, archival material and drawings, many of which were produced as part of a special research project, led by the editors and other colleagues at Kingston School of Art.
The book is conceived as a conversation, with many voices telling tales of pubs across London, and through them teasing out important themes including architecture, music, LGBTQ+ history, comedy, migration, and intangible cultural heritage. Interspersed are shorter texts written by the editors, covering over 100 pubs across the city’s past and present, weaving a tapestry of the pub’s complex and diverse role in the life of London, from 1388 to 2021.
Context
Published by Open City to coincide with the 2021 Open House London festival.
Credits
Including contributions from: Jennifer Lucy Allan, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey, Clare Cumberlidge, Ruth Ewan, Paul Flynn, Kelly Foster, Laura C. Forster, Orit Gat, Phineas Harper, Rupa Huq MP, Jonathan Moses, Daniel Rosbottom, Bernd Schmutz, Neal Shasore, Bob Stanley, Timothy Smith, Eleanor Suess, Isy Suttie, Jonathan Taylor, Luke Turner, Lily Waite, and Jaega Wise, and with a preface by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.
Edited by David Knight and Cristina Monteiro
Designed by Studio Christopher Victor
Published by Open City
Financial Times Books of the Year 2021
Feature in The Guardian, September 2021
Buy the book here
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When architecture students draw pubs
Our book ‘Public House’ originated in a series of educational programmes with architectural students at Kingston School of Art. Back in 2009 David was teaching postgraduate Unit 2 at the school with Adam Khan and Bernd Schmutz, and students that year developed richly evocative studies of London pubs with complex histories as part of their studies, going on to design buildings with unrelated programmes (a youth club, a mosque and a community farm venue) that should learn from the subtleties learned while studying pubs.
Following this a school-wide programme, taught by David but this time with a wider group of tutors including Cristina, Daniel Rosbottom (then head of school), Eleanor Suess, Timothy Smith & Jonathan Taylor, set the students as a whole the task of documenting the London pub as a means of getting under the skin of contemporary issues of heritage in the UK, and London in particular.
One of these drawings was published way ahead of the others, as part of the Delight section of The Architectural Review in 2010. Much later, in 2021, drawings from both programmes were rediscovered and reused for the book. Here we present a small selection of those original drawings together with some links to some of their creators.
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