Pubs as we know them today owe a great deal to Margaret Thatcher. Her government’s 1988 Licensing Act allowed public houses to extend their opening hours from as early as 11 a.m. to as late as 11 p.m., which caused something of a moral panic at the time, with some of the press suggesting it would end up with us all running riot. It was a major change, but it was also just a return to the norm. Restrictions on pub opening hours had first come into being during the First World War, when the government dictated that they run from noon to 3 p.m and 6.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m. Before then pubs were generally open from 6 a.m. through to 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. So the 1988 legislation was arguably long overdue; it’s hard to believe that when I was drinking in pubs in the early 1980s I was still being impacted by restrictions imposed during the crisis years of the First World War.
But further legislation was laid down in 1989 that had much more far-reaching consequences for the British pub, which surely none of its originators would likely have imagined. Both for good, and for bad, but mostly the latter. Known collectively as the Beer Orders, the new laws came about following a government investigation into the operating methods of the six big UK brewers, which they concluded were anti-competitive. To break the brewers’ stranglehold on pub retailing the government decreed that no single brewery would be allowed to operate more than 2,000 tied pubs. This doesn’t sound like an unreasonable thing to do – breaking up monopolies is a good thing, right? When the breweries duly started selling off their pubs, the buyers tended to be newly formed companies designed specifically to fill this new gap in the market. Essentially property management companies but created solely to run pubs, they became known as pubcos. Enterprise Inns, for example, started out in 1991 by buying 300 pubs from Bass (which had around 7,000 pubs and needed to shift thousands), and grew exponentially through the 1990s to become the largest pubco in the UK, while another big-hitter was Punch Taverns, which started up in 1997. The original motivation of the legislation was to increase competitiveness and keep beer prices low . . . how did that work out? Well, I think we all know the answer to that one. The pubco became part of the hospitality landscape, and there was trouble ahead. Journalist Phil Mellows summed it up in an article in the pub trade’s Morning Advertiser in 2019: ‘This piece of paper [The Beer Orders] was destined to kick the UK’s pub and brewing industry into the air, hit the ground a different animal and continue to chase around in a frenzy.’
But the Beer Orders offered an opportunity for individual buyers too, and one which Mike Belben and David Eyre grasped with both hands. Keen to open their own restaurant and finding the high rents and initial costs involved in setting up a place prohibitive (especially in the recession of the early 1990s), they struck on an idea: why not pick up one of the many pub leases now going cheap? And so we had our first ‘gastropub’. It was a simple reaction to a change in the marketplace. As Jay Rayner once said: ‘[the gastropub] is not a creature of changing social habits and attitudes to eating out, though it has driven them. It is entirely a creature of economics.’ On top of that, if the public house provided a relatively low financial entry point for those wanting to run their own kitchens, it also provided the relative protection of the pub licence – a pub can sell drink to customers who aren’t eating, a restaurant cannot.
But back to Mike Belben and David Eyre and their search for a pub – a search undertaken on the simplest of principles. ‘The Eagle was the first and cheapest dead pub we found,’ said Eyre in the introduction of his book of Eagle-inspired recipes Big Flavours & Rough Edges. But, situated on Farringdon Road in London, it was also a good location for their new venture to thrive with the offices of the Guardian newspaper just over the road. When The Eagle opened its doors in 1991, the principles behind its ambition were equally simple: to serve good food made from fresh produce. ‘I’ve always been more than a little bemused about why the Eagle was regarded as such a radical notion when it opened,’ said David Eyre, ‘and then how it became so influential in changing what we all now expect from a pub.’ From Eyre’s point of view, they were just serving ‘simple, intelligent’ food in a pub, but as it happens, those ‘big flavours and rough edges’, paraphrased from a review by Jonathan Meades, were what a good many of us wanted to eat. Belben and Eyre presented us with an unpretentious room with little snobbery or frills, and speaking for myself, that’s exactly what I wanted. In fact those of us who were in the process of becoming the first generation to develop the ‘habit of restaurant use’ that Tom Jaine had written about at the end of the 1980s, were the Eagle’s- bread and butter. There were no bookings, the menu was scribbled on a blackboard and when the fish or whatever was gone, it was gone: this new generation were happy to be treated thus, not fawned over and pampered – and grab me another pint when you go to the bar to order your pudding, please.
Of course, not everyone liked the arrival of the gastropub phenomenon. One criticism of their proliferation is that it led to some establishments no longer really being pubs at all. This is a valid point to make, but it was already true of many a country pub and old coaching inn such as The Bell at Aston Clinton and The Walnut Tree in Llanddewi Skirrid, which were to my mind restaurants built into the bones of old pubs. Likewise, The Sportsman in Seasalter, near Whitstable, has been one of the most revered restaurants in the UK over the last twenty years or so but it’s also in a pub, and you can still have a drink in the garden on a summer’s evening if you don’t fancy the £85 five-course tasting menu. But, to be honest, to go but not to eat would seem like a form of insanity.
The Eagle always seemed to be busy when I went – rumbustious, sometimes even a little chaotic. It felt like no other pub with the smells and sounds from the tiny kitchen filling the sparse room. There was a kind of manic energy about the place. The Bife Ana – the Eagle’s own steak sandwich – was drawn from David Eyre’s childhood in Mozambique, and if a steak sandwich sounds a little predictable, a little basic, it’s fair to say your average steak sandwich at the time was usually a sorry affair in a flabby roll or baguette. Few took the time to marinate the beef in red wine with onions, dried chillies, herbs and garlic, or to serve it loaded onto a roll with generosity, or to source decent ingredients in the first place that tasted of themselves. To find somewhere that took the humble steak sandwich to such heights was a joy – it was the perfect pub food to soak up a pint or a glass of red wine. This was before the burger revolution that was on the horizon; perhaps it was even the precursor. Flavours at the Eagle were mostly from the Mediterranean with a pasta dish here, a bruschetta there, and sardines charred on the grill – it made your lunchbreak feel like a summer holiday. It felt at times like a canteen for media workers in an era when we would drink at lunchtime (I know it wasn’t just me!) and there always seemed to be time for one more round. As the 1992 edition of The Good Food Guide said of the food: ‘it has transformed the Eagle from something few people wanted or needed into a major social service.’ And that’s why the gastropub is a good thing.
Extract from Blood, Sweat and Asparagus Spears: The Story of the 1990s Restaurant Revolution by Andrew Turvil – former editor of The Good Food Guide (out now, published by Elliott & Thompson).
