ABSTRACT
Across the country thousands of redundant, unevenly distributed licences rendered running pubs and beerhouses as profitable enterprises extremely precarious. Excessive numbers of licences, product of the “free licensing” period (1830–69) and plummeting per capita beer consumption, was one complicating factor which legal authorities had recognised in Liverpool, Sheffield and elsewhere since the late 1870s. After 1899, falling beer consumption aggravated overcapacity in breweries, revealing growing numbers of superfluous licences. Competition intensified among brewers, who responded with bogus working-men’s clubs, the long pull and beer hawking, practices which antagonised retailers. Brewers pointed to turnover levels of 60–80% per decade as the norm, but these were never approached, much less matched, in the representative St. Pancras pub sample between 1840 and 1939. So many problems here and elsewhere were rooted in redundant licences, thwarting Progressive efforts to impose order, efficiency, social control and cultural uplift.
