Drinkers’ folklore in the north of England still registers disdain for the “Carlisle collar,” the inch of froth atop pints of beer as served in the reformed state-run pubs of the First World War, conspicuously short measure compared with the “long pull” generously dispensed in traditional houses. David Gutzke firmly aligns himself with the Carlisle experiment and subsequent interwar private-sector reforms by a cadre of enlightened brewers, upon whom he confers the posthumous accolade of Progressives. Foremost of these otherwise disregarded heroes of the hops was Sydney Nevile of Whitbreads, the giant London brewers. Something of an outsider in the trade, Nevile commissioned spacious new pubs designed to counter the intensive drinking and degraded reputation of the Victorian beer shop and gin palace. The new model houses featured handsome “country house” frontages, gardens and car parks on the outside, disinterested management, a smaller serving area, more extensive seating, recreational amenities, and a full food service on the inside. London with its new suburbs was the heartland of this environmentalist campaign, Birmingham the most advanced provincial site. The interwar improved pub, claims Gutzke, inculcated bourgeois ideals of social control and moral uplift, grafting middle-class custom onto its traditional working-class base and attracting the humanizing presence of women in a hitherto repellently masculine stronghold. Thus the reinvented public house became the vehicle for “nothing short of a revolution in social habits,” while also (mostly) returning a profit (17). By the 1950s, however, such patently modern premises became reviled as barnlike concrete boxes, offending the resurrected ideal of the more intimate, historically reassuring Victorian-style pub and obscuring a remarkable success story. Of some nearly six thousand rebuilt or newly built pubs from the twenties and thirties, little more than fifty authentic reformed pubs survive.

In many ways Gutzke's long-fermented and earnestly erudite pub crawl is an exemplary piece of research, combining computer-based data with extensive trawling of brewery archives, licensing records and trade press, and interviews and contextual sources, thus fortifying the author's stern correctives of more negligent and misinformed historians. Pubs and Progressives is most convincing on substantive questions of location, number, cost and design, corporate and licensing politics, and movements of supply and demand. There is also an effective use of transatlantic concepts of place-product-packaging to demonstrate the pioneer role of British brewers in developing imaginative marketing strategies, particularly in the address of women. There are some telling, if cheaply reproduced, illustrations. Much less convincing is Gutzke's intriguingly speculative but ultimately overstretched promotion of Nevile et al. as Progressives (persistently capitalized) analogous with the American model. Nevile himself might have been more plausibly identified as one of Harold Perkin's “cranks,” his fellow improvers cast as Whiggish welfare capitalists rather than the radical middle-class professionals in ferment across the pond. The very different mood of American Progressives is captured in Michael McGerr's excellent recent account under the title Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), while as Gutzke elsewhere notes, the brewers’ reforms were meant to counter postwar popular unrest rather than exploit it.

Claims for the singular role of the reformed pub in the putative embourgeoisement of the nation's manners are tempered with acknowledgment of the complementary influence of the 1930s supercinema. Among other factors that might be considered is the effect of improved housing, aligning the aspirational associations of the newly introduced pub lounge with new standards of domestic comfort and the rhetoric of the Daily Mail Ideal Homes exhibitions. Indeed, the greater privatization of the interwar period, together with other competing leisure alternatives, may have reduced the appeal of the pub as the “pivotal” institution represented here. Gutzke helpfully defines the lounge area of the reformed pub as “gender-neutral” in its facilitation of female custom (158). He might have noted that other evidence suggests it also constituted a new site for snobbery and discrimination that undercut the brewers’ bid for greater inclusion. Significantly, by the thirties, this was mostly delivered in an appeal to a common, if gentrified Englishness.

The brewers’ own words give little indication of the quest for moral uplift with which they are credited. Their main aims were orderly and easeful consumption attended by the moderation and civility induced by the environmental reform of pub culture: “We don’t want people to drink more beer; we want more people to drink beer” (30). Beer was advertised more as a lifestyle accessory than as an end in itself, with a greater promotion of bottled beer and the appeal to modern qualities of lightness and brightness. Such motifs recall the earlier success of bottled Bass Ale introduced in the 1870s, extolled as a temperance drink and exemplifying the then novel delights of “drinking by the eye.” David Gutzke's argument for the industry's leading role in modern marketing techniques is well taken. If some of the author's larger interpretive propositions can seem as insubstantial as the Carlisle collar, there is much of value here, particularly the contribution to an understanding of the complex watershed decade of the thirties.