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A heartfelt case for why the English pub still matters and how we can save it.
In Pubs for the people, Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan offer a daring defence of the humble public house, waging battle against those who see the pub only as a poignant symbol of a bygone England.
Making a journey into the nation’s living room, they blend tales of Singh’s father – the founder of London’s first ‘Desi pub’ – with a lively travelogue that carries them from a hipster nightmare in Shoreditch to an izakaya-inspired Eccles pub run by migrants from Hong Kong. Along the way, they take on private equity, yuppie gentrifiers and culture-war blowhards who use the pub as a prop for their rage-baiting patriotism.
Life today can seem lonelier, angrier and poorer than it did before. But as Singh and Valluvan show, the pub offers the inviting prospect of a more equal, sociable and comfortably multiracial England.
Sivamohan Valluvan is a sociologist at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (2019). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Renewal, Salvage, Red Pepper and Progressive Review.
Amit Singh is a sociologist at University College London. He is the author of Cancelled Futures: Class, Race, and Place in Post-Industrial Britain (2026). He would, in another life, have been a fourth-generation publican.
Introduction: pubs for the people?
1 The rise and fall of the pub
2 Racism, rupees and the ‘world famous’ Glassy Junction
3 The Wetherspoons takeover
4 Hipster pubs, gastropubs and somewhere in between
5 Death of the rural pub?
6 Pubs for other Englands: mixed grills in the Midlands
Conclusion: salvaging the good life?
Index