The word tavern and the first British pubs arrived with Roman roads
Britons were brewing ale before the Romans came, but it took the Roman road network to create the first roadside drinking houses, the tabernae, which gave English the word tavern. The pub as we know it, with its long bar, etched mirrors and brass pumps, only took shape in the 19th century.
After Roman rule ended in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons ran alehouses, probably ordinary homes at first, attested from the 10th century, that became places to gossip and organise mutual help. As pilgrimage and travel grew, inns offered lodging, food, and stabling for horses; London's hostellers gained guild status in 1446. A tax survey of England and Wales in 1577 counted 14,202 alehouses, 1,631 inns and 329 taverns. Even the Inns of Court, now pillars of the English legal profession, began as ordinary inns where barristers met to do business.
The term public house appeared in the late 17th century to separate houses open to all from private ones. For a long time alehouses looked like any other dwelling, and away from towns the publican often brewed the only beer. Then the Industrial Revolution and the Beerhouse Act of 1830 brought a boom. Pubs borrowed the flash of gin palaces, ornate mirrors, etched glass, polished brass and tiles, and hand pumps sped up service.
Breweries fought for customers by buying pubs outright and hiring publicans to run them. By the end of the 19th century more than 90 percent of English pubs were brewery-owned tied houses. In 1989 the government's Beer Orders tried to force big brewers to sell, but the pubs largely passed to non-brewing chains called pubcos.
Numbers have fallen every year since at least 1982, blamed variously on the 2007 smoking ban, cheap supermarket alcohol, gastro-pub competition and the economy. After the pandemic and inflation, pubs in England and Wales hit a record low of 39,970 by June 2022, 7,000 fewer than a decade earlier. The Campaign for Real Ale still insists a true pub needs a bar, draught beer served without food, and an indoor area not set for meals.
Source: Pub
