Drink and the City: Alcohol and Alcohol Problems in Urban UK, since the 1950s

This book uses Nottingham, a city in the East Midlands of England, as a case study to examine changing attitudes and responses to drinking and alcohol problems in the UK from the 1950s to early 2000s. Based on original research drawn from local archives and oral histories, it examines responses to drink and drink problems over time, comparing local developments with those nationally. In the 1950s pub going and drinking were viewed by city inhabitants as essential activities, just as now. Author Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham-based novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) describes Saturday night as “the best and bingiest glad-time of the week.” For the majority of people, drinking and occasional drunkenness were acceptable and tolerated aspects of everyday life. However, in the 1950s, the idea of the ‘alcoholic’, a medical as well as moral phenomenon, surfaced in society.


The book describes how, as this view took hold in the 1960s, it became associated locally with poverty, and viewed in the extreme terms as a problem of the vagrant alcoholic. The vagrants’ ever-presence in the city, coupled with their unsanitary drinking, gave the place an unwholesome look. In subsequent decades, street drinkers continued to inform the local approach and went through a number of transformations; from the hooligan/ drunken football fan of the 1980s to the young binge drinker of the late 1990s/early 2000s.