The Crooked House and English national pride
The decline of England’s pubs is robbing us of our material history
I was listening to Irish podcaster Blindboy talking to Professor Carl Chinn about English working class history and why it’s hard for progressive English people to talk with any love about their national identity, due to our concentration on national politics rather than material working class history. Chinn brought up the example of the Crooked House, a pub in the Black Country which burned down after it had been acquired by developers. A court case about what happened is ongoing.
Blindboy says that “for English people to speak about their history, it can make them a bit queasy and unsure because a huge amount of English history is a history of colonisation, of the Empire. And the other thing is a fear that it can come across as nationalistic, as adjacent to fascism.” Chinn offers an antidote to this, speaking about English history as inclusive. History is too important to leave up to the right wing and political elites who want to tell their own stories.
We don’t really learn working class history in the UK, or the history of social movements like the Chartists who gave us many of the democratic reforms which Parliament relies on, like regular elections, and access to voting that was not dependent on land ownership.
The land clearances of the 18th century deprived the peasantry of their material connection to the land, and even today, examples like that of the destruction of the Crooked House show the material destruction of working class history is ongoing. Chinn traces this history of loss back to the Normans, who erased Anglo-Saxon place names and replaced them with Norman ones. The standardisation of English, making upper class grammar and dialect the standard also placed working class English speech in a subordinate position, denigrating the traditional dialects of ordinary people.
The Crooked House, in Himley, near Dudley, was known as Britain’s ‘wonkiest pub’. Built in 1765 as a farmhouse, it became a pub in the 1830s known as ‘Siden House’, with siden a Black Country dialect word for crooked.
The pub itself is a central community space within traditional English culture. Before the advent of trains, inns, taverns and ale houses — which all later became classified as ‘public houses’ for administrative purposes in the 19th century — acted as communications, trade and travel hubs along roads where you could rent coaches and horses, barter deals, watch cockfights, or meet sex workers.
As the 19th century wore on and many of these functions developed specialised institutions of their own, pubs lost some of their glory, but retained their central community role. The Crooked House would have hosted miners from the collieries whose mining created the subsidence that gave it its character.
Thomas Burke began his book The English Inn (1930) saying “To write of the English inn is almost to write of England itself… as familiar in the national consciousness as the oak and the ash and the village green and the church spire.” McLaren, likewise in The London Public House (1928), said the pub was “the true temple of the English genius”, recalling the poetic spirit of culture that appears in Blake’s pamphlets.
It’s hard to argue with the central place of the pub in English identity, yet you don’t see all the English nationalists getting angry at greedy landlords and offshore private equity firms for closing them down. If you want to read more about the history of the English pub, the quotes above come from Paul Jennings’ The Local: A History of the English Pub, which I recommend.
Like the land enclosures, the material culture of traditional England is being swallowed up by capital. The private equity firms that now run most of the big pub companies see pubs as an asset to be mined for rents, not as an integral part of communities and social life. To complain of the demise of the pub, which has been accelerating in recent years, is to complain of the loss of the material culture of Englishness which was never seen as valuable by the landed elites who ran the country.
The pub was always a problem for those in charge; something to be regulated and controlled with alcohol licences and closing times. And now the existence of some pubs is getting in the way of developers making a profit. I’ve seen this in London, where property tycoons buy up pubs, run them down and hike up rents, and then apply for a change of purpose to make them into luxury flats.
This is happening with pubs like the White Swan in Charlton, or the China Hall in Rotherhithe. Local news reports say these pubs are owned by ‘offshore’ companies, yet they are both managed by Golfrate, the property management company of the Aziz family, who run a large property development empire across London, the land of which is all owned by various Isle of Man based companies who happen to share the same address.
In the Blindboy podcast, Professor Chinn says of the destruction of the Crooked House that “this is one of the problems we face in this country. They don’t normally do that, knock down buildings straight away. What they do to an old building that could have a place in the modern world, they let it deteriorate, and once they let it deteriorate enough, ‘oh it’s health and safety, we have to knock it down.’”
Examples of this are not hard to find. In 2015, developers CTLX bulldozed The Carlton Tavern, a London pub due to be granted Grade II listed heritage status by English Heritage. The local community protested, and Westminster Council ordered the pub to be rebuilt brick by brick.
The owners of the Crooked House are small time developers compared to big property owning empires like that of the Aziz family, or big pubcos like Stonegate, who own 4,500 pubs across the UK. Stonegate is based in the Cayman Islands, and owned by TDR Capital, a private equity firm who also own Asda. TDR representatives including Managing Partner Gary Lindsay recently appeared before the Business and Trade select committee to reassure MPs that refinancing Stonegate and Asda’s debt would be possible.
The chair of the select committee, Labour’s Liam Byrne, said that “The private equity model creates big tax incentives for people to load up some of these companies with a lot of debt.” Byrne added, “When it comes to Stonegate then, you have lost Manjit Dale from the board, you have debt of £2.5 billion, you have a debt increase of about £650 million and you have significant loans maturing this year. It is not completely clear that the cash in the business can cover that interest payment at the moment.”
The appearance by TDR managers before parliament has not reassured investors, with trade publications writing articles like ‘Over 4,500 Stonegate pubs ‘at risk’ as debt pile mounts’.
Material places like pubs are a vital part of any attempt to reclaim a positive sense of English identity based on love of place, community and history. They are places that allow us to break out of our digital isolation and meet our friends in person without governments or corporations advertising to us or hoovering up our data. They are places where our attention is not monetised, and often where we can connect to the built environment of our local community, and trace its history of industry, trade, migration and change.
Pubs are closing at an unprecedented rate across the UK. Here I have added together CAMRA statistics for long term pub closures from 2021–23 to their list of permanent closures from 2016–20 to give some idea of the increasing pace of pubs closing for good across the UK.
At the root of these problems with disappearing material heritage and the distaste at English nationalism felt on the left is the problem of land ownership. It is the lack of supply of land that causes the housing crisis, that causes the destruction of buildings which stand in the way of profitable developments, and the loss of pubs converted into luxury apartments.
If you want people to be proud of their country, you need to give them a stake in it. If ordinary people can ever hope to earn enough money to buy their own property, they are effectively just serfs living on the lord’s estate, and we have reinvented feudalism.
If we are disconnected from the material history that built the country we live in today, we cannot understand how we got here, why our political system functions as it does, and why the old aristocratic elites of England still have such a stranglehold over its land. We may still not end up feeling a great sense of pride in being English, but we will at least know why the country we live in today is in such a mess.
