What Are The Principal Features Of British Pubs?
The pub is a central part of English life and culture. Pub- going is deeply ingrained in British society and has long been renowned all over the world. Consequently , recognizing the principal features of British pubs is of great importance for any foreigners to travel to the UK and achieve a deeper understanding of the Britishness.
1. The origin of British pubs Pub, an abbreviation of public house, is a place of alcohol drinking, friend gathering or just self-relaxing. It now can include meal serving, music performing, and some game entertaining to satisfy a variety of customers. Etymologically, it was not until 19 century that the word public house came into existence. However, its history dated back to the Roman occupation around 2000 years ago (Johnson, 2015). At that time, along the large Roman road network stood many tabernas for the …show more content…
Important features of the British pubs. British pubs, though sharing some cross-cultural similarities of a drinking place such as a neutral territory as “great social leveler”(SIRC, 2008, p. 14) to serve a purpose of enhancing social interaction, still have some uniquely distinctive features, which contributes to its worldwide reputation. Unlike pubs or bars in other countries, British pubs are designed to have no table-service system (Fox, 1996). In other words, customers, instead of enjoying their table and looking forward to pub’s waiters, have to be self-service by ordering themselves and paying at the bar counter. Cash payment is often made immediately after purchasing a drink. Such non-existence of waiters seems to be of great inconvenience for the uninitiated tourists and new pub-goers, who may then miserably assume the British pubs to be unprofessional, disrespectful to the customers. In fact, a number of tourists had experienced such a long-time-waiting embarrassment. In an observation study, the amount of waiting time had varied from the minimum of around two minutes to the maximum of 45 minutes (Fox,
1. The origin of British pubs Pub, an abbreviation of public house, is a place of alcohol drinking, friend gathering or just self-relaxing. It now can include meal serving, music performing, and some game entertaining to satisfy a variety of customers. Etymologically, it was not until 19 century that the word public house came into existence. However, its history dated back to the Roman occupation around 2000 years ago (Johnson, 2015). At that time, along the large Roman road network stood many tabernas for the …show more content…
Important features of the British pubs. British pubs, though sharing some cross-cultural similarities of a drinking place such as a neutral territory as “great social leveler”(SIRC, 2008, p. 14) to serve a purpose of enhancing social interaction, still have some uniquely distinctive features, which contributes to its worldwide reputation. Unlike pubs or bars in other countries, British pubs are designed to have no table-service system (Fox, 1996). In other words, customers, instead of enjoying their table and looking forward to pub’s waiters, have to be self-service by ordering themselves and paying at the bar counter. Cash payment is often made immediately after purchasing a drink. Such non-existence of waiters seems to be of great inconvenience for the uninitiated tourists and new pub-goers, who may then miserably assume the British pubs to be unprofessional, disrespectful to the customers. In fact, a number of tourists had experienced such a long-time-waiting embarrassment. In an observation study, the amount of waiting time had varied from the minimum of around two minutes to the maximum of 45 minutes (Fox,