Gin in Regency England
While industrialists in Manchester were busily engaged in developing the factory system, investors in London were applying its principles to the capital’s old pubs. The result was a coldly efficient business model. Jessica Warner explains how it worked and why it failed.
The Labour Party’s 2010 manifesto committed it to protecting the ‘pubs on which community life depends’. The underlying alarm that the traditional English public house is rapidly disappearing has been raised so many times over the past two centuries that it may seem a small miracle that any are still standing. Some of the threats to the pub are more real than others, however, and of these one of the most serious came from the monster gin palaces of the Regency era.
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