In the immediate wake of Christmas 2021, as Covid-19 levels soared across the UK, social distancing measures had been introduced to limit contacts in pubs, bars, and other hospitality venues in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, but the national government in London remained reluctant to introduce such measures in England. Indeed, on 27 December, it had announced that no further restrictions would be put in place until at the earliest of the new year. This news was particularly welcomed by the nation’s pub trade, which enjoys a large portion of its annual business around the festive period. 

By the end of December, the UK’s daily reported infection rate had topped 189,000. In the summer, as lockdowns were eased, the Health Secretary had caused some disquiet when he had suggested a possible worst-case scenario of 100,000 new cases a day. Britain was now approaching twice that number. Epidemiologists’ estimates suggest that real infection rates are at least three times the reported rates; that means that at the close of 2021, nearly 1% of the entire British population was contracting the virus every 24 hours. The demand for home testing kits was running so high that the national stock of the kits ran dry. There were around twelve thousand Covid patients in hospitals, and daily death tolls numbered in the hundreds. Although the Prime Minister announced that the country was in an ‘incomparably better’ position than it had been twelve months earlier, by that point very few people tended to believe anything much of what he said. 

In early January, it was announced that face-coverings would again have to be worn in school classrooms, and public sector organizations were asked to plan for 25% staff absences. By then, there were nearly fourteen thousand Covid patients in English hospitals alone. But, even then, the protocols for English pubs still remained unaffected. In the days that followed, various ministers continued to stress that no further measures would be necessary. Four days into the new year, as the UK’s daily Covid incidence report hit 218,724 cases, Boris Johnson announced his wish to ‘ride out’ this wave of the pandemic without bringing in any further restrictions. Twenty-four hours later, amidst reports that one in fifteen people in England had been infected with Covid at the end of 2021, and hospitalizations exceeding seventeen thousand cases, the Prime Minister confirmed that he did not intend to introduce additional measures for at least three weeks.

So, why had the British government been so extraordinarily insistent that – at least as far as public bars were concerned – England should enter 2022 subject to (as the Health Secretary put it) ‘some of the least restrictive measures in Europe’ even as a major rise in pandemic hospitalizations appeared (as that same minister said) ‘inevitable’ – a rise which was already causing what the Prime Minister himself described as ‘considerable pressure’ on the health service? 

Nearly two years earlier, on March 20, 2020, the sudden closure of public bars had come as a particular shock to many people. Just a few days before the implementation of a full lockdown, this dramatic move had at last brought home to the country the severity of the situation. This may seem strange to citizens of those nations which do not share the UK’s emphasis upon its social drinking culture. Indeed, the impact of this decision may in part at least be explained by England’s peculiar obsession with its pubs.

The public house has a long and noble history at the heart of English culture. More than six centuries ago, Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims set off from Southwark’s Tabard Inn at the start of The Canterbury Tales. Shakespeare’s Falstaff made merry with the future King Henry V at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap. Dickensian London seemed to have a pub on every street corner, and Sherlock Holmes was partial to a visit to a decent inn. Today, the most popular and enduring soap operas on British television, EastEnders, Emmerdale, and Coronation Street, are set in communities whose social lives revolve around their local pubs, with their drinkers having frequented the Queen Victoria in East London since 1985, the Woolpack in North Yorkshire since 1972, and the Rovers Return in Greater Manchester since 1960.

It should therefore perhaps come as no surprise that, at moments of the greatest national crisis, literature and cinema’s most intrepid Englishmen have tended to seek sanctuary in the reassuring embrace of their local pubs. In the late 1970s, at the start of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the archetypally English everyman Arthur Dent finds solace over a few pints of best bitter in the Red Lion, even as his planet is about to be demolished to make way for the construction of an interstellar bypass. ‘Drink up,’ says his friend, ‘the world’s about to end.’

Upon discovering the collapse of modern civilization in John Wyndham’s novel of 1951, The Day of the Triffids, Bill Masen had also headed straight for the nearest pub: ‘Stepping into the public bar gave me for a moment a comforting sense of normality. It was prosaically and familiarly like dozens of others.’ Edgar Wright’s heroes in his 2004 movie Shaun of the Dead flee from the zombie apocalypse that has engulfed their world towards the homely haven of the Winchester Tavern. In Wright’s 2013 sequel, his protagonists uncover an invasion of alien robots whilst on a pub crawl towards the aptly named World’s End inn.

Pubs are also places where British politicians like to be seen, enjoying a traditional jug of real ale in a beer garden, or (especially at election time) showing their hands-on approaches to their jobs as they pull pints behind the bar. These political players are desperate to look down-to-earth, and there’s nothing like a glass of bitter and a bag of pork scratchings to help them seal the illusion of their personable ordinariness in the public imagination. This, for example, represented much of the secret of former commodities dealer Nigel Farage’s unlikely man-of-the-people appeal as, over the years, he doggedly waged his Brexit campaign. And it was conversely the reason why the Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, had been so embarrassed to find himself thrown out of a pub in April 2021 – not for drunkenness (that would have been almost forgivable) but (much worse) for having failed to oppose government lockdown restrictions which were seen to have crippled the UK pub trade.

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And so, in Spring 2020, it wasn’t just that we were suddenly facing the greatest threat to our way of life that we’d ever known, it was that our world was about to end without even the shred of comfort afforded by a visit to a local saloon bar, the one good thing that we’d always been promised would accompany the apocalypse.

There is something quintessentially English about the tavern or alehouse. In the 2021 edition of his fascinating history of the English pub, The Local, Paul Jennings observes that, while the country inn is traditionally considered in the general consciousness to be resonant with an ‘Englishness felt to be embodied in the past’, the urban pub is ‘also seen as expressive of the national genius’. The name says it all: the public house, a civic realm for and of the people, indelibly etched upon the national psyche.

To threaten the future of the country’s favorite drinking dens is therefore to strike at the heart of what it is to be English. It is to undermine both, that spirit of English liberty so beloved of the conservative shires and that ethos of the community so central to the working-class culture of England’s grimmer inner cities. 

This is why, through crisis after crisis, governments have variously endeavored to avoid the forced closure of the country’s beloved pubs. It is also why the British tabloid press has recently been able so successfully to resurrect a popular loathing of such puritanical imperatives as those which once, under the reign of seventeenth-century England’s notoriously party-pooping Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, forbade the more gluttonous excesses of yuletide festivities. These right-wing papers have declared that the UK’s self-appointed technocrats (those experts so reviled by the freedom-loving Right) have under the guise of public safety been seeking to impose unnecessarily authoritarian pandemic restrictions, in a bid to deprive the common people of their God-given right to enjoy their cakes and ale.

At the end of December, the BBC reported that ‘some scientists advising ministers are concerned the government may be taking an overly optimistic approach when it comes to restrictions’. Yet this scientific consensus has repeatedly been portrayed by its critics as a fundamentally treacherous assault upon the very nature of Englishness. It is thus that, as Paul Jennings notes, industry and media responses to those ‘fears over the long-term future of the hospitality sector’ raised by the Covid-19 emergency have in recent months often again come to stress what he calls ‘the idea of the pub as a much-loved national institution’. 

The pub is for so many the site and source of respite from their daily toils, an oasis of rowdy calm, a kingdom where all are equal under the rule of the landlady or landlord and the clang of the bell that heralds the call for last orders at the bar. Despite its rootedness in the nation’s history and traditions, it is also a location reflective, for the most part, not only of the breadth of society but also of how that society has evolved. What was once an overwhelmingly white and masculine domain has now become an emphatically multicultural and gender-balanced space. 

It remains true however that its intrinsic emphasis upon the consumption of alcohol continues to exclude members of one major British demographic group, and it is unfortunate that this may in part contribute to that group’s continuing marginalization from aspects of wider social discourse. It is nevertheless the case that the public house has in recent years made efforts to offer a welcoming environment to those who prefer not to participate in its more intoxicating pleasures, although it may be admitted that stone-cold sobriety in the midst of drunken revelry can still be a somewhat disconcerting and even alienating experience. For, while alcohol may represent a great social lubricant and leveller, it can also of course raise tensions and exacerbate aggressions and differences.

Yet the English pub remains a place associated primarily with a sense of living local community, and with that feeling of joyous release at the end of the working week. It is a place for wedding parties and wakes, a place of cozy comforts and camaraderie. All human life, in short, is here. 

It is also an invaluable arena for civil debate. It is, as such, a prime location for the functioning of that vital element of democracy that we call the public sphere. For its regular patrons, it is more home than home, the hub of their extended family, a modest little utopia. ‘As soon as I enter the door of a tavern,’ wrote that great eighteenth-century man of letters Samuel Johnson, ‘I experience oblivion of care and a freedom from solicitude.’ Everything here, then, feels right with the world.

This is why our pubs matter so much to us. They embody the soul of who we are, our history, our shared identities, and social ideals. They represent the refuge to which we turn in times of national crisis, from the days of the Blitz to the imagined apocalypses of our popular science fiction. It’s bad enough that the world as we knew it may be on the verge of collapse; but to take away our one remaining chance of consolation – the one thing we had come to rely upon in these times of unprecedented uncertainty – would be the lowest of all possible blows.

All this may therefore help to explain why, against every dictate of science and logic, this current government has for such a long while appeared quite determined to resist the eminently reasonable arguments that general access to these vibrant public hubs should again be limited by the reintroduction of social distancing and related safety protocols. It is almost as if to place restrictions on the freedoms of these explicitly public spaces would be to fetter the very essence of Englishness itself. This is because, for so many decent ordinary people, these places are the very heart of our communities and our nation, their beers and wines the life-blood that runs through the arteries of our land, their spirits the ether of our souls, and their musky odors of moldering upholstery and cheap carpets stained with stale ale the very air that sustains and unites the cultures of our cities and our shires, and still, even (and most especially) in these darkest of times, brings centuries of proud heritage alive once more today.