UK's weird, wonderful and largely overlooked estate pubs are quickly vanishing
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Pint enthusiasts and wine lovers have been called on to shun country inns and visit Britain's often overlooked and misunderstood estate pubs before they disappear. Historians and pub activists have urged Mirror's readers to do their bit and help save an often overlooked breed of boozer that is increasingly at risk of vanishing from our streets, having been forgotten in favour of posher countryside inns. Estate pubs were the first built after WWII that came to symbolise the return of normal life and hope.
Architectural investigators Matthew Bristow and Emily Cole warn that post-war drinking dens have fallen out of fashion, yet symbolise an important part of the UK's history - its long, hard climb from the misery of WWII to a brighter, prosperous future.
For the 12 years during and after the war, not a single pub was constructed anywhere in the country, thanks to building restrictions that lasted from 1940 to 1952. Once they were lifted, what emerged were a series of innovative, modernist, often brutalist building projects that embraced a growing sense of post-war positivity as Britain looked towards the future.
In the wake of wartime attrition and a desire for a bright new world, architects began to dream up properties of all kinds with bold shapes, light interiors and daring layouts as councils across the country built 1.47million homes during the 1950s, in a desperate race to fix the housing shortage that resulted from the Blitz. Many were built on vast estates that embraced new ideals of how people should live in a far more structured way than the higgedly-piggedly towns and cities that had evolved pre-war.
