Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan offer a daring defence of the humble public house in their new book, Pubs for the People. They wage 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 Singh and Valluvan show that 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.
Pubs for the People is published this month by Manchester University Press.
“With Pubs for the People, Amit and Vallu have really captured the spirit of the British pub and offered a crucial perspective on the importance of its continued existence,” said Matthew Curtis, editor of Pellicle magazine.
“So often this great cultural institution is taken for granted, but here it is captured with deep respect, an incredible level of research, and some wonderful writing.”
