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So have at it: explain to us Yanks what a pub is. Give us the whole nine yards – what role it plays in a person’s life and the life of the community, what its associations are, who runs them, who goes there and why, etc., etc., etc.
Our basic assumption over here is that pub=bar, but there’s clearly more to it than that. Tell us what we’re missing. It has to be more than darts, surely.
Cards. You forgot the card games.
The Pacific Northwest has neighborhood pubs. Bars too, if that’s how you roll. Lots of Northwesterners think that a pub isn’t truly a pub if it doesn’t brew its own beer.
Pubs come in all shapes and sizes: smelly and dowdy, big, brash and noisy. But the “local” is the place where you feel at home. It’s like an extension of your living room, but with a bar and draft beer.
The things you’re looking for are conviviality, an atmosphere you feel comfortable in - for me, it’s a lack of loud music - and drinks that you like.
As a generality, apart from teetotallers, when you’re making friends with someone, the primary meeting point is the pub. It’s also what you do after work sometimes.
Many pubs also serve food - some of it excellent (“gastro-pubs”), so they’re also places to go for a meal. Lunchtime is popular to visit a pub within the working environment, usually for food but, though this is dying out, many people have a pint or two at lunchtime and go back to work.
Another thing to remember is that most of these places are old. The name “Elephant and Castle” is a corruption of “Enfanta Casta” and is left over from the crusades. Often they’re victorian, though sometimes much older: my friends own a pub that was built in 1699, but there has been an inn on the site since the 1300s.
I’ve lived in the US, and the difference was stark: most pubs were places to go and get toasted; while these do exist here, I suspect the majority are aiming for conviviality. Though I have to say, there was a great place next to me in Connecticut that did lots of great food and was very friendly. As another generality, I’d say that they’re more important in the community than churches are.
I should say, the best “local” local I ever attended was in the next village to me, where they had my own pewter tankard behind the bar, and when they saw me arriving they’d pull a pint of my favourite ale and have it ready for me when I got to the bar. Sounds like I should have been an old duffer with a huge belly and a beard, but actually I was only 19. I just loved it that way.
Sadly, I forgot to get my tankard off them. It was a Christening gift. 
Never heard “Enfanta Casta”, but the widespread idea that it comes from Infanta de Castile (Spanish term for a princess) is probably wrong. More likely is that it refers to the howdah, the little carriage, on the back of an elephant.
:smack: Sorry for perpetuating an untruth. I withdraw. Still, some of them are very old nonetheless.
Sal Ammoniac: ownership. AFAIK there are two main kinds of pub in the UK. Brewery-owned, or “free house”. In general the brewery-owned ones employ the landlord/landlady as a manager. They usually get accommodation above the pub thrown in. Sometimes these people are long-established in the premises, but at other times they’re peripatetic managers, sent from pub to pub. This tends to spoil their relationship with the community. Also, choices of drinks and decor are up to the brewery. I don’t as a rule like brewery-owned pubs; also some of these breweries have evolved into faceless conglomerates with gigantic real estate portfolios.
Free houses are independently owned and run as businesses. They’re in the minority, but IMO they’re universally nicer. They can buy drinks from any supplier, so there’s more variety, and because they’re profit-motivated, they make more effort to please. They also tend to do more food, since it’s another revenue generator. The downside is that, since they’re small operators, they have to pay more for the supplies, so their prices are a little higher than brewery pubs.
There’s a halfway house position too, where the brewery sells a long-term leasehold to an owner, with certain stipulations such as “you may only buy beer from us”, but allows the owner to run the pub as they please.
Bars have a different ethos to pubs, and are often just drinking places and pick-up joints, often with expensive cocktails and loud music, rather than community centres.
I had the same experience as you, jjim, when I lived in a small village down in the south. It was a typical English village - quaint cottages, a village green and a very friendly pub.
The pub was over one side of the village green and the road was so constructed that if you walked down one particular part of it, you could only be going to the pub. The landlord had big windows across the front of the pub and it was also up a short flight of steps (convenient for outside seating in the summer where people could watch what was going on around the green.
Of course, it also meant the bar staff had a relatively good view of the road and who was coming along it…and many times we’d arrive at the pub to find our drinks already on the bar. Oh, you don’t get service like that any more!
The only downside was that you couldn’t vary what you were drinking until after you’d had that first one!
Round here you do, or at least I did until I moved recently - you had to pass all the windows along the front of the pub to get to the door, and my pint was often ready for me as a result.
Basically, what jjimm says, about being an informal place, and importantly neutral territory - meeting friends or strangers, nobody’s playing host to anyone else. Naturally, there’s all sorts of little bits of social etiquette that go along with it.
(Thankfully, around here most brewery pubs are Adnams ones, who do aim to have long-term landlords who also have a lot of freedom to run the pub as they like and as individual settings require)
jjimm — thanks for the good information. A couple of random questions (and I’m sure I’ll have more later):
How can you tell the brewery pubs from the freehold pubs? Is it obvious from the signage? (And incidentally, this is one thing we don’t have here in the States at all. We have chain restaurants, some of which serve drinks obviously, but no chain bars or pubs that I know of.)
How do people take to outsiders? It sounds to me like there are a lot of regulars at most pubs, which would make outsiders conspicuous. Is there any unfriendliness toward people – like, say, Americans – who happen to wander in?
Do people ever take their kids to the pub?
Is there generally recorded music playing?
Signage shows either the name of the brewer, or ‘free house’ (or the name of a non-brewing pub management chain such as ‘Pubmaster’). (FWIW, 19th-century breweries were innovators of corporate identity, with the Bass ‘red triangle’ being the first registered trademark in Britain, and many city pubs still having their exterior decorated with tiles of the brewery’s particular choice of colour(s)).
Outsiders are welcome - ‘pub’ = ‘public house’, after all! In a group, you just make yourself at home at a table. If by yourself, a decent barman will engage you in a bit of conversation, probably drawing in a local or two sat at the bar, or there’s nothing strange about just bringing in a newspaper at sitting quietly. Many pubs will have a few papers lying around anyway. Although doing this at 10.30pm on a Friday might not be a great plan! And it’s not hard to become a regular: a really good barman will remember you after one visit, get to know your name & preferred drink after a couple, after which you’ll get greeted as a regular when you next walk in.
Proviso: there’s some pubs where strangers will certainly get a few strange looks, to say the least. But you’re unlikely to find yourself in one of these without a reason to be in that part of town, and the exterior generally will give the impression it’s not a nice place to have a quiet drink anyway.
Americans - if you get into conversation with locals, then expect a bit of jibe and banter. But don’t take it personally, it’s the way we make informal conversation, and you’re not being singled out. Everyone will get a bit of stick for something or other, and it works as a social leveller.
Kids are OK in many pubs during the day, particularly in those serving food. I’ve never fully understood what the licencing laws exactly say, how much they vary for individual pubs, and what’s the law about evenings. Signs such as ‘food served - families welcome’ make it pretty clear that they’re OK. Any pub with a garden will be fine with the kids there, even if not inside. Others will have a designated room(s) away from the bar in which kids are allowed.
You can tell the types of pub apart because the brewery pubs will have the name of the brewery prominently displayed either on or near the sign, as in this example, which is round the corner from my house. Free houses say “Free House” somewhere on the pub, or sometimes on the sign itself, such as this one.
About 20 years ago in the town of Thame, Oxfordshire, where I went to school, there was a very old pub called the Saracen’s Head, that featured the decapitated head of a crusader-era Muslim. The pub shut down, and years later I moved to Connecticut. One day I took a drive to a British food store, to get Marmite and curry sauce and other stuff I was homesick for, and there on the wall of the store was the Saracen’s Head pub sign. I knew it was the right one because it displayed the name of the local brewery: A.B.C. (Aylesbury Brewing Company). Quite freaked me, I can tell you.
Interestingly, the setup in Ireland is quite different. Pubs are usually the name of the landlord (or original landlord), and have occasional supplementary names. Such as Neary’s in Dublin, which is on Chatham Street, and is also called the Chatham Lounge. In the Republic of Ireland they are all free houses, but most buy from the Guinness brewery which makes lots of other drinks under license, so there tends to be a near-uniform distribution of available beverages.
Pub signs in themselves are an ancient tradition, and while most follow a well-established formula, some can be quite witty. There was a racist joke on one near my parents, which was called, IIRC, ‘The Hopeless Task’, and the sign featured a washerwoman trying to get a black child “clean”. That was replaced in the 1980s…
Taking to outsiders depends really on the pub. In the worst-case scenario, in some pubs with well-established ‘regulars’, there can be a hostile silence when an outsider walks in (think American Werewolf in London). Sometimes there are curious looks before everyone carries on. In bigger places the visitor will be treated as anyone else. And in some places - and here Ireland is way better than the UK, or England at least - there is warmth and acceptance, and conversation flowing. Conversation is more common between strangers when sitting at the bar than sitting at a table.
Regarding etiquette - well the other day I was in the Bird & Baby (‘The Eagle and Child’ - where Tolkein and CS Lewis used to drink together) and was waiting at the bar to order. Suddenly I got a hard tap on the shoulder. “Excuse me, I was in the line,” said an angry Israeli tourist. I had to explain patiently that there is no line at a bar in a British pub. There’s a melee, but people tend to be served in order. He protested, but I held my ground, and when the barman caught my eye, I motioned that the Israeli guy was there first. This is how it’s done!
Some pubs are kid-friendly, but kids have to be off the premises before a certain hour - it used to be 7 pm but I think this has changed. In pubs with restaurants attached, kids are more likely to be allowed at any time. Also, some pubs have play areas, often outside in the ‘beer garden’.
Finally it is 99% likely there will be recorded music playing. The Harcourt Arms that I used to drink in didn’t have music, but it was very rare. In the UK, live music must be licensed, so it’s relatively rare, and when it happens a big deal is made out of it - amplifiers, a charge to get in, and so on. In Ireland, there is no such stipulation, and there’s more of a tradition of folk music, so live music is more common and incidental, and often occurs spontaneously - someone brings an instrument, someone else joins in, and “a session” happens.
ETA: Damn you, GorillaMan, for getting in there first! I shouldn’t have taken so long writing my post!
One big change for English pubs which is about to happen is the total ban on smoking. This has already happened in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland. I have heard mixed messages from these countries about how this ban has affected trade.
Many pubs round here are building out-door shelters for the hardened smokers. This has now attracted criticism from environmentalists because some pubs are planning to use electric or gas-powered “patio heaters” to keep their customers warm .
Interesting pub name near me is the Bell & Steelyard (the photo on that page). Many tourists & visitors, and a few locals, start enquiring ‘where was the steelyard?’. It’s actually the steelyard balance still overhanging the road, used (by the taxman, naturally) to weigh carts travelling between the harbour and the market square.
What if you aren’t a drinker? Would it raise eyebrows if you went into a pub and ordered a coke?
StG
Not at all.
I have no cite but I was under the impression that "The Elephant and Castle "came from the coat of arms of the East India Company which included an elephant carrying a howdah.
My apologies if I am mistaken.
Is it considered to be a bit on the alcoholic side to go to “pubs” on a daily basis, like it would to go to bars? Or is the idea to only drink one each time? I mean, I just can’t picture going to a bar often enough that they actually remember me or what I like to drink.
Yeah, going every day puts you into the ‘he likes his drink’ category (although few would use the a-word). But you don’t need to go this often to be a regular, not in a good pub, re. my comments earlier about good barmen.
Also, plenty of people are creatures of routine…maybe they stop in for a couple of drinks on their way home at 5.30 each Friday. Maybe they have a pint on their way to the football every other Saturday (football pubs themselves, close to the stadium, are a different matter on matchdays!) Maybe they spend half an afternoon reading the entire Sunday Times. In these cases, it’s likely to also be all the same staff every time you’re there.
Since nobody’s mentioned it yet, Passport to the Pub by Kate Fox - now better known for her bestselling book Watching the English - covers most of the basics from the viewpoint of a social anthropologist. Note that she’s specifically concerned with English pubs; from personal observation and experience, a couple of the rules work slightly differently in a Scottish one.
