Fear of the “super pub” in mid-century Britain

From the 1930s to the 1950s various lobbies expressed anxiety over the arrival of the “super pub” – public houses that were bigger and flashier, with broader appeal and less soul. We’d previously come across the term superpub in a quite different context, writing about the Wetherspoon chain and its contemporaries in the 1990s. (See 20th Century Pub, chapter 9, ‘That’s no Moon’). But an earlier usage also appears in 20th Century Pub, in passing, in a quote from A.E. Richardson, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, in a letter to The Builder magazine from May 1950. Here’s a fuller version of the quote we used in the book, with our own emphasis: There now arises the grim spectacle of the prefabricated and metallic inn which, as yet, only exists on paper… The mentality which has evolved the designs, recently made public, is typical of an age of morons… The designers and promoters of competitions for modern pubs apparently wish to cater for beings from another sphere. They aim…