The country pub offers a seductive account of an imagined country lifestyle – timeless bucolic images and rustic comfortable settings. However, there is a deeper, darker side to these spaces which are more often than not, reimagined cultural spaces of exclusivity and ideological renderings of conservative identity politics.
The ‘traditional country pub’ has become a simulation of a fantasy ‘traditional country pub’. For example, it is very hard (particularly in the more affluent areas of southern England) to find a pub in a rural area that it not a gastropub. It is a bizarre hyper-reality, postmodernist oxymoron – the systematic extinction of ‘traditional country pubs’ by faux, gentrified, sanitised versions of the same thing but offering a kind of chocolate box image, acceptable version for the middle and upper classes. These are bland lifestyle spaces for virtue-signalling of a very specific and dominant type of country lifestyle, one based around exclusivity and specific constructions of what the countryside is, who has legitimacy to access it and a sense of belonging in it.
Elite country lifestyle has been idealized and is often represented as a picture of authenticity. However, this clamour for a sense of authenticity destroys what it seeks – such as the country pub – and it destroys what was there to recreate within a specific and reimagined image. Indeed, contemporary farm workers would not fit in these spaces that once accommodated them. Cultural authenticity is rendered through tastes, habits and social, cultural and political traits to create an acceptable and sanitized version that fits in with contemporary aspirations and exclusivist snobbery. Here, the country pub exists within specific spatial borders that are time and location specific and have very little to do with a sense of organic authenticity. Pubs are cultural fictions and present lifestyle choices, these are entirely situated within our neoliberal world of commodification. The country gastropub is a reflection of a cultural hegemony or dominance of how the countryside is imagined – but it is also a dominance of power that marginalizes others. It can be viewed as a type of colonialism, a glaring example of postmodern fiction and assimilation.
In this sense aspiration, exclusivism and specific lifestyle choice operate as a specific interpretation of the country pub. This plays upon and uses deeply entrenched and established systems of inequality and sells it back as a commodity and lifestyle choice that sits within the contradictions of contemporary society as some sort of escapism or bubble. The countryside has often been the site of class conflict and contestation over meaning however it has increasingly become a space where those further down the class hierarchy (but also ethnicity, sexuality, belief etc) are excluded.
What is apparent when you enter these spaces is often a simulation of tradition (in other words, tradition is ideologically created around specific ideas) and this becomes ‘real’ and authenticated through a belief in a simulated reality. This leads into wider discussion and debates around the postmodern condition and what is real and what is fantasy/ simulation, however the country pub is a good example of simulated, idealized, superficial and ideological constructions taken as reality. The point being that postmodernism provides us with an array of choices, lifestyles and individualism, it also provides us with an array of realities. We can pick and choose (in many instances) which realities we may desire – it being the ultimate consumer product that fits within our belief systems, values and how our desires are formed. But what is powerful here is the aura that surrounds the concepts of tradition, pub, countryside etc. and which informs imaginations particularly within England – and how this plays out some degree of embattled or precarious sense of national identity.
These concerns may seem trivial, but the banal or everyday conveys power. For example, superficial expressions and humour are used as vehicles to express order and place within the reimagined country pub. The repurposing of old iconography to give precedence and credence to new idealisations even when it appears to be parody and ridicule – such as the ubiquitous use of the Tetley Bitter man. The use of irony is crucial here – the reinforced and ubiquitous use of foxhunting or other ‘country pursuits’ of class and feudal stratified occupations of peasants and farmhands and lords of the manor, a sort of joking-not joking portrayal where these idealised accounts and representations are actually to be taken literally. A sort of ‘why take it so seriously, it’s just an image, tat, etc…’ An amusing olde world but utterly accepted as reality and an underlying deference to these structures of power as legitimate social frameworks. So the use of irony and cliche and fiction becomes reality and becomes the means to express authenticity. As Ziauddin Sardar (1998) comments, fictional representation is thus everything. This is applied not just to the gastro country pub but a whole manner of representations of the English countryside from adverts, movies and tv dramas to magazines. We live in an age defined by and obsessed with image and representation, which utterly shapes our sense of reality.
Also irony is used to sugar coat the bitter pill of intense class exclusivism that has a direct lineage from mystical representations to cold hard reality of the present. What is presented is an illusion, a mirage which make it seem that hierarchies and control are consigned to some sort of cosy past but which are entirely alive and well within the present. The status quo is not only preserved as a legitimised relic of the past but is reinforced as a specific ordering of the present. Power iniquities being more prevalent than ever before but now you can pay for the pleasure of dining within the museum. The historic themes are just repackaged, and the countryside is ethnically and socio-economically cleansed.
However, there is clearly a wider discussion here around the ability to exercise free will and ability to make consumer choices about the reality in which we want to locate ourselves. First of all, there is the issue of social, cultural and political influence and context. Secondly many of us are clearly excluded through socio-economic means but also wider discourses and narratives that place us within specific realities and ghettoises us. These are socio-cultural spaces of snobbery where conceptual understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are implied and delineated. This goes back to the initial point being that the English country reality specifically excludes in a practical and socio-cultural sense – your type doesn’t fit in here, and by the way, you can’t afford it anyway!
