Drinking was a hugely popular pastime for the inhabitants of Georgian England. For at least two centuries, three distinct types of public drinking places had been established: the alehouse, the inn and the tavern. Each of these ancient institutions was licensed differently, sold different drinks and catered to their own specific clientele.

Alehouses were the most common of these enterprises and they primarily furnished the common people, ranging from journeymen and labourers to domestic servants, with beer, basic food and in some cases lodging.

They were the favoured location for neighbourhood and communal gatherings, and provided the lower orders with a range of other vital services. Many alehouses, for instance, served as early employment agencies where employers could visit and expect to hire willing workers.

Alehouses played an instrumental role in the establishment of workers’ ‘box clubs’, benefit societies and in the development of the early trade union movement. The London Corresponding Society (a parliamentary reform group), for example, held its first meeting inside the Bell in London in 1791. However, the alehouse was also a place of fun and entertainment. According to an alehouse regular, Francis Place, alehouses were a place for drinking with friends and for playing games of chance or dexterity, skittles, dutch pins, bumble-puppy, drafts, dominoes .

However, many alehouses developed an unsavoury reputation and were closely linked with crime and disorder. Small wonder then that at the end of the 18th century Sir Frederic Eden observed that it was not the fashion for gentlemen and people of rank to frequent alehouses. Instead, the upper echelons of society preferred the ambience and comfort provided by an inn or a tavern.

Inns
Inns were traditionally the domain of travellers. They provided guests with wine, ale and beer, together with food, accommodation and overnight stabling for horses. However, there was an enormous variation in the standard and range of services offered by an establishment categorised as an inn.

In the cities and large provincial towns, many of the inns were elegant institutions that appealed to the urban elite and fulfilled many of the functions now carried out by modern day hotels.

Coaching inns could be found at regular intervals alongside the major roads of the day. These usually catered to the upper and middle class traveller but they wouldn’t all have been grand establishments and much would have depended upon their location and how busy and affluent their particular stretch of road was. In many cases, a remote inn would have been little more than an alehouse and unable to provide all the facilities and services commonly associated with an inn.

Market or carrier inns were the smallest but most common type of inn. These acted as depots for the network of carriers that delivered goods up and down the country and often replaced market squares as the favoured location for business transactions.

Inns were, in general, notable local landmarks and established themselves as the commercial centre of their respective village, town or city. They were frequently used as auction houses and were superb locations for markets. Merchants and traders could visit an inn, stay overnight and conduct their business in a confidential manner without ever having to leave their comfortable premises.

Certain inns would become synonymous with a particular agricultural good or manufactured product and were the first choice destination for those interested in purchasing or trading in these specific areas. In Northampton, for instance, the town was renowned for its leather and shoe industries, with their trade centred on the Peacock Inn.

The courtyards of inns invariably included a diverse range of shops. The George at Southwark, for example, accommodated a wholesale grocer, ironmonger and a flax warehouse. A multitude of itinerant service providers including tailors, vets, tutors, medical men and dentists would also congregate at the inn. In the spring of 1757, for instance, a Dr Shappee lodged in the Black Bear, Shipston-on-Stour, on his way to London, and later cured a variety of ailments at the Crown, Farringdon and the George.

Much of important public administration was also carried out at inns throughout the 18th century. Official meetings such as inquests, quarter and petty sessions, manorial courts, bankruptcy commissions and licensing sessions, as well as board meetings for turnpike trusts and canal companies, were all regularly held at these institutions.

The inn, unsurprisingly, played an integral role in the social and recreational life of the local community. Inns would offer a range of entertainment to suit the tastes of their regular clientele. Grander inns catering to the affluent would entice customers by regularly putting on a combination of dinners, balls, concerts, recitals, lectures and exhibitions. Inns were also the main venues for a collection of travelling shows that exhibited wild animals and human curiosities, such as ‘the little corsican fairy’ who visited Leicester in 1775 or the appearance of O’Brien the Irish Giant at the King’s Head in Norwich in 1797. Meanwhile, those inns attracting patrons from the opposite end of the social spectrum would hold events of more interest to their clientele such as cockfighting, football matches and skittles.

Taverns
Taverns were upmarket institutions and were the favoured drinking haunt of the wealthy professional classes during the 18th century. They lacked the extensive accommodation offered by inns but they were renowned for selling wine and elaborate meals. Taverns were above all else places of pleasure, relaxation and contentment. As Dr Johnson famously asserted, No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced, as by a good tavern.

In contrast to the inns and alehouses that provided a variety of important services, the tavern merely fulfilled a basic want for the well-to-do members of society. The tavern provided these respectable gentlemen with the opportunity to overindulge in a consequence-free environment.

Foreign visitors were often shocked to discover that inebriation was a vice shared by all sectors of society. It is not the lower populace alone that is addicted to drunkenness, explained a bewildered Cesar de Saussure in a letter to his family, numbers of persons of high rank and even of distinction are over fond of liquor. All men, even churchmen, have a particular club or tavern, where they meet at least twice in the week to drink together in company.

Despite their popularity in London, the tavern remained a predominantly urban phenomenon and their numbers remained relatively low outside of the capital. In Norwich, for example, a 1783 trade directory revealed that there were only four taverns in the city.

By the end of the 18th century the tavern as a distinctive enterprise had virtually vanished. Perhaps the most straightforward explanation accounting for its demise was that it had lost its unique selling point: the sale of wine was no longer the sole preserve of the tavern. In addition, a steady growth in the number of restaurants drew once loyal patrons away in the direction of fashionable new eating houses.

Similarly, the rise in the number of specialist social and commercial provisions such as auction rooms, offices, town and county halls, theatres and assembly rooms led to the steady erosion in many of the inns’ primary functions and this began to divert people away from them. Furthermore, high society began to frown on the excessive drinking escapades that taverns, and to a lesser extent inns, were famed for and gentlemen of rank now opted to spend their leisure time in more sober and refined alternative environments such as the gentlemen’s club.

During the 19th century the activities and clientele for both the tavern and many small inns gradually became indistinguishable from those of the alehouse. As the boundaries between these once distinctive drinking houses became increasingly blurred all three establishments gradually evolved into institutions referred to as public houses.