Maurice Gorham and Edward Ardizzone prepared their celebration of the London pub on the eve of the Second World War. Gorham hymns each essential element of the local in turn: the Regulars; the Barmaids; the Saloon Bar; the Public Bar. Ardizzone’s accompanying colour illustrations, taken from life, provide a visual primer to some of the great pubs of the time, many of them now lost to redevelopment, but a few essentially unchanged. Many copies of the book and the original plates were destroyed when the publisher Cassell was bombed during the war; this attractive reprint from Little Toller makes available again an intriguing insight into a unique institution, already under threat in 1939, and now all but vanished.

Little Toller Books | Hardback 96 pp. |ISBN: 9780956254597