The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
The AR has long theorised on the architectural and cultural essence of the British pub. In its pages and over pints in its once private pub, the Bride of Denmark, crouched in the basement of the Architectural Press’ former offices in Queen Anne's Gate. This week's Reading List compiles reflections on this quintessentially British obsession that is at once a fix and fixation.
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Pub crawl: the cultural, social and built heritage of the London pub, AR online, Ellen Peirson
‘Memories of wasted nights of open-mouthed laughing over sticky tables, chairs screeching across floors, beer splashed across billiards tables’
Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub, tells the extraordinary architectural and political story of London's public houses published by Open City in collaboration with The Architectural Review. AR readers can get 20% off the price of Public House using the code ARREADER at the Open City online shop
Ian Nairn at the pub, AR December 1962, Ian Nairn and Kenneth Browne
‘The drink can be as subtle and as exciting as you wish, if you choose your brewery; and the room, as these pages try to show, can become a powerful spatial parable’
Typology: pub, AR September 2016, Tom Wilkinson
‘Sentimentality is in any case essential to the pub’s ripe atmosphere, along with drip trays, urinal cakes and swirling, sticky carpets’
The pub music hall, AR March 1949, Harold Scott
‘Not only did it offer wine and song at once, but its architectural decor had a rich ebullience that was as much an expression of a genuine popular culture as the performance that its patrons came to see’
Leisure as an architectural problem, AR December 1938, Donald Pilcher
‘Its ancestors, the Tavern and the Pleasure Garden provided comparatively fully for the free time activities of the people who frequented them. The most that is found in a town pub today is a back garden’
The Bride of Denmark: The AR's private pub, AR May 1996, Peter Davey
‘The AR's mixture of hard-line Modernism, the Picturesque, love of tradition and surprise, Englishness and the exotic was conflated there. Its built stories raggled over each other, interweaving, and suddenly bursting out’
Inside the pub, AR Editors, AR October 1949
‘The Church and the Pub have proved to be two of the knottiest architectural problems of our age. Perhaps in the interior of the pub the problem that wrecks contemporary architecture is posed more vividly than anywhere else’
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