The Last Pub in England

For every family, every society, every peoples, gathering is essential to the cultural experience.

In England, there has been much talk about the disappearing third space. Where friends comes together outside of the home and of work to enjoy each others company. So perhaps it isn’t necessarily a pub wherever you are in the world, but in the U.K., the Public House has taken up that role in a large capacity for some few hundred years now. Their decline marks a period of decline in society at large; social, economic, political.

In the nineteen years to 2019, 13,600 were closed, and the rate of closure is only accelerating. In 2025, one pub closed permanently every day in England and Wales, and they’re replaced by betting shops, vape shops, and fast food chains. And by 2050, if nothing were to stop these closures, the last pub on these isles will shut for good.

We know, intrinsically, the value of third spaces, because we despair at their loss. It is much talked about in the media, but rather as something of a natural phenomenon than a choice we are making as a society, and crucially, one that can be averted.

We feel the loss of third spaces most pressingly when we want to affect change in society, and the avenues for communication without being surveilled by state actors are sparse. But by then, it’s too late.

Secret Ballot. Paid Parliamentarians. Suffrage for every man. These were the demands of the Chartists: a UK wide movement of the 1800s. With it, the right to peaceable assembly and the right to roam were wrapped up in their ideals.

In a period marked by deteriorating living standards and unparalleled industrial progress, this group - the Chartists - came to prominence in the 1800s to demand representation in parliament, knowing that without having a voice to advocate for their interest in the most sovereign body in the nation, they would never have the power to improve the lot of the working class.

On April 10th, 1848, the Chartists assembled on Kennington Common to demand reforms to the constitution. This was an extraordinary movement in itself simply for the display of class consciousness that was impossible for the authorities to ignore. The original plan for the Chartists was to march to parliament and present a petition to both chambers. But in an effort to stifle the growing movement, in 1848, the Crown and Government Security Bill was passed that made any act intended to intimidate parliament a felony; punishable by imprisonment or transportation to the colonies. And so, it was singularly presented by the Chartist advocate and Irish parliamentarian, Feargus O’Connor.

But the meeting on Kennington Common had the same desired effect - because the chartists knew the value of assembly and the value of assembly on the common in particular.

This was land that was saved from the enclosure movement of the previous hundred years. Where land that was once free for the general public to use was privatised - and this indispensable type of “third space” was becoming less and less available for people to use at their leisure, convenience, and exploit.

These commons - which would otherwise be extinct - are all over the UK because people protested against the enclosure of this land that they had a historical, and arguably constitutional, right to use.

In London, where I live, I am lucky enough to count Tooting Common, Wimbledon Common, Mitcham Common, Clapham Common, and Wandsworth Common among the local areas that I am free to roam. A luxury owed to the Right-to-Roam movement that led the resistance to enclosures.

Without third spaces, we lose a vital aspect of society that leads to its improvement, and the danger has come where warped solutions to the condition of England are beamed through our screens by unreliable sources, rather than being impressed upon us by our interactions with each other in our local communities.

In the time of the Chartists, the condition of England was much discussed. The likes of Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Dickens wrote about the horrors that working people endured in the slums and workhouses of Victorian Britain. But in the end, there was no substitute for the power of the assembled masses.

By the end of that day on Kennington Common, the Chartists had failed. The meeting was dispersed, the charter ignored, and the state apparatus unchanged. But the fervour lived on. By piecemeal, over the course of the following century, proposals put forward by the Chartists were adopted and their methods roused the sympathies of those with the means of affecting change, whilst buoying the wherewithal of future generations who would follow in their footsteps. In turn, ushering in the democracy we know and cherish to this day.