Good, homely, troublesome or improving? Historical geographies of drinking places, c. 1850–1950

This paper surveys historical geographies of drinking places designed for the consumption of alcohol between about 1850 and 1950, covering work published in English on sites in Europe, Russia, the Americas, and parts of Britain's empire. Five key aspects of drinking places are identified. The paper first considers them as significant social spaces associated with positive conceptions of both the public sphere and public space before exploring the ways in which drink became a spatial problem for contemporary observers, both in terms of their internal design and layout, and in their arrangements and concentrations in space. Histories and historical geographies of workers and patrons in these sites then suggest that the spatial problems associated with drink might also be classed, gendered, racialized, and sexualized. The last two sections of the paper review work on aspects of drinking places shared across many different social and geographical contexts: licensing and the provision of highly regulated ‘improved' sites for the consumption of alcohol. Similarities across many different contexts may reflect common social patterns or the development of shared strategies for reform. The conclusion suggests a few areas that might be developed.

campaign (Pliley et al., 2016). The provision of "improved" places on the model of the "Gothenburg system" in many of those countries also demonstrates that these ideas travelled from their origins as collective solutions to the problem of alcohol consumption.
Crucially, though, these networks were not universal, and these ideas did not travel everywhere. Licensing was sensitive to local contexts and while Gothenburg-style drinking places appeared in many of the countries listed above, they were managed by different actors and took different forms to grapple with varying problems. Work on licensing and the Gothenburg system provides opportunities to compare drinking places, and to think about the development and dissemination of policy, the ways in which governmental technologies shape and are shaped by their contexts, and more. And because these phenomena concern the governing of spaces, there are points of connection with work on other social problems. This is not just a paper on drinking places, then, and it will hopefully find a wider audience beyond those working in "drinking studies." It is a survey first and foremost, though, and while it returns to some of these questions in the conclusion, there is insufficient room to tackle them at any length.

| "GOOD PLACES"?
Drinking places were significant social institutions during this period. "The tavern took on some of the characteristics of the commune" in the rapidly growing cities of mid-nineteenth-century Russia (Transchel, 2006, p. 28). In early-twentieth-century Germany, the tavern was "the locus of working-class social life" (Roberts, 1984, p. 117), "one of the few places where workingmen regularly met each other as equals" (Roberts, 1991, p. 101). The chapel and the pub were the "twin foci of most nineteenth-century Welsh communities" (Lambert, 1983, p. 13), and the nineteenth-century French café was described as the "church of the working class" (Haine, 1994, p. 16). Churches and drinking places could be rivals, as they were in Britain (Harrison, 1973), but Mass-Observation argued that the pub was a stronger social institution than religion, politics, or popular media (1943), "a public and a political space … a temporally and spatially liberated public sphere" (Hubble, 2006, p. 211). Ben Clarke suggests that for interwar writers like George Orwell and Patrick Hamilton, the pub offered a reconnection to communal life, "a refuge from loneliness and a space that brings this loneliness into focus" (2012, p. 48; 2015).
This widely shared view of drinking places led Ray Oldenburg to suggest that they are a kind of "third place" between home and work (1989), providing hospitality (Bell, 2007) as well as shelter, sustenance, and comfort. Oldenburg's model "great, good place" is the nineteenth-and twentieth-century German-American lager beer garden; they appealed to immigrants of different classes and to families, and therefore to (some) women. This sense that drinking places are neither "public" nor "private" can also be seen in Perry Duis's suggestion that US saloons were "semi-public city spaces" (1983, p. 3). While London's gentlemen's clubs were "seemingly in the heart of the public sphere," they "provided their members the friendly intimacy and privacy ideally located in the home" (Milne-Smith, 2006, p. 797, andsee Milne-Smith, 2011). The same was said of Kenyan clubs for European men in the 1930s (Willis, 2002), but the ordinary mid-nineteenth-century pubs of Stalybridge could also be "hybrid" public/private spaces offering a comfortable, domestic sociability (Booth, 2018). W. Scott Haine argued that working-class patrons treated the cafés of nineteenth-century Paris as domestic spaces that offered a form of "communal privacy" (1996, p. 55) and in Roubaix in Northern France, the working-class culture bourgeois observers saw in public cabarets stood in for the private domestic lives hidden from view (Clement, 2020). The blurring of "public" and "private" may have been part of the appeal of these and other drinking places, for different classes of drinkers.
Drinking places were home to rich associational cultures as well as informal sociability. British pubs hosted political groups (Harrison, 1973), artisan botanists (Naylor, 2002;Secord, 1994), sports fans (Collins & Vamplew, 2002), Friendly Societies (Cordery, 2003, and literary societies and eisteddfods (Lambert, 1983;Pritchard, 2012). Social clubs, established as an alternative to pubs, provided facilities for both education and leisure (Cherrington, 2012;Tremlett, 1987). Irish pubs played a similar role in masculine working-class life (Malcolm, 1998) KNEALE -3 of 14 and were important sites of political agitation (Kadel, 2003(Kadel, , 2015. For French working-class men, débits de boissons (drinking places) were sources of information about work, accommodation, and credit, homes for clubs and associations, and significant political spaces (Barrows, 1991;Prestwich, 1988). Leisure and democratic politics also collided in the urban bars of 1920s' Gold Coast, despite strict colonial licensing, high import duties on gin, and the suppression of locally produced akpeteshie (Akyeampong, 1996a(Akyeampong, , 1996b. Montreal's "Joe Beef's tavern" was a clearing house for information, a platform for debate and political campaigning, and a source of entertainment, accommodation, and emergency funds (DeLottinville, 1981(DeLottinville, -1982. These stories challenge the arguments of historians who saw drinking places as the target of attempts to pacify popular culture (e.g. Storch, 1975Storch, , 1976Storch, , 1977. Other historians saw glimpses of self-regulation, or a parallel culture of working-class respectability. In Germany, the associational culture of taverns "disciplined drinking behaviour by subordinating it to other goals and purposes" (Roberts, 1984, p. 117). British publicans may have realized that respectability was good for business (Girouard, 1975). However, many of these examples highlight the exclusions that made these third places "good" for those who were invited to take part; we will return to this later.
We should also note that "third places" do not require alcohol. In the cities of the Ottoman Empire, coffeehouses were "good places," unlike taverns operated by non-Muslims (Matthee, 2014); in Chengdu, China, teahouses and wine houses complemented one another (Wang, 2008). We will return to this question in the conclusion, but we now turn to historical work on the ways in which they were seen as problems by contemporary observers.

| SITES OF CONCERN: MICROGEOGRAPHIES AND DISTRIBUTIONS
Emphasizing the more spectacular aspects of drinking places risks obscuring their role as sites of everyday sociability (Booth, 2018;Yeomans, 2014), but they were often the focus of well-documented political, religious, or moral concern. This section considers two spatial aspects of this problem: the internal microgeographies of these drinking places and their distributions in space.
The character of some "third places" may well have been shaped by an emerging urban sociability characterized by anonymity, detachment, and money's ability to act as "the most frightful leveler" (Simmel, 1950, p. 414).
Developing cash economies made drink more accessible to migrant workers in the rapidly growing cities of tsarist Russia and Southern African mining camps, for example (Ambler & Crush, 1992;Transchel, 2006). Strangers met or separated into groups in drinking places, and these meetings and separations troubled some commentators. Social mixing brought the threat of criminality, class or racial conflict, sexual contact, and moral "contamination"; but the separation of drinkers into homogenous groups could also be troubling because it implied unsupervised drinking, political activity, or immorality.
The internal microgeographies of some English drinking places-vaults, saloon bars, ladies' bars, and morewere thought to reflect their patrons' "instinct for social distinctions, their morbid passion for what Americans call self-stratification," (Gorham, 1949, p. 30). The long bar counter that served an open room, uncluttered by seating, was associated with early gin palaces and a "drink and go" culture of vertical drinking and social mixing (Clark, 1983;Gorham & Dunnett, 1950), but in some British towns, pubs began to close open spaces off into compartments after 1850 (Girouard, 1975). Sala's gin palace had "not only a bar public, but divers minor cabinets, bibulous loose boxes, which are partitioned off from the general area" (1859, p. 72). The idea that this was a consequence of "the ineradicable class-consciousness of the English" (Gorham & Dunnett, 1950, p. 26) had been suggested in the 1890s and the lack of supervision this afforded was a source of concern across Britain, with "ladies' bars" thought to be an especial temptation to women drinkers (Brandwood et al., 2004;Girouard, 1975;Kenna & Mooney, 1983;Kneale, 1999Kneale, , 2012. Mass-Observation had a keen eye for the classed and gendered spaces of midtwentieth-century Bolton's pubs (1943) and Stella Moss (2016) perceptively explores their material cultures and homosocial practices, from the "rough masculinity" of the plain vault (spittoons, sawdust ditches, few seats) to the "associational sociability" of the comfortable taproom (seating, memorials, games). These microgeographies 4 of 14 -KNEALE materialized social identities, while providing opportunities for reflections on the value of both interaction and segregation.
However, there is of course a geography of these developments as the complex relationships between licensing authorities, local trade organizations, and other social and economic factors made drinking places very sensitive to their local contexts, shaped by market pressures (competition or the lack of it) and regulation (licensing authority strategies, police attention). Pub layouts varied for these reasons, for example, in Bradford, Portsmouth, and Dartmouth (Eley & Riley, 1991;Jennings, 1995Jennings, , 2007, and the different pub types that emerged in Liverpool and Manchester reflected the contrasting relationships between demand, business decisions, and regulation in those cities (Mutch, 2003(Mutch, , 2004(Mutch, , 2006(Mutch, , 2008. The second problematic aspect of drinking places was their location in space. Brian Harrison's suggestion that British pubs were concentrated in working-class areas in this period (1973, andsee Vaughan, 2015) is echoed by work on the locations of drinking places as different as Brighton's beerhouses and pubs (Robinson, 2015), Calcutta's "punch houses" (Fischer-Tiné, 2012), and Mexico City's pulquerías (Toner, 2011). In these widely different contexts, observers noted relationships between residential segregation, class, and drinking. Of course, these sites were also highly visible because they were closely policed (Dhillon, 2015).
Mappings of drink made during this period raise new questions about the nature of drinking places as spatial problems. In the British case, it seems likely that drinking places were seen as causes, not symptoms, of social problems; these "moral geographies" (Driver, 1988) mapped the pernicious influence of drinking places and targeted them for reform. If drinking was an individual moral failing, it made little sense to blame pubs, but in this period "environmental" arguments encouraged reformers to consider the social context of drinking (Kneale & French, 2008). These maps revealed concentrations of drinking places where these influences were supposedly strongest (Kneale, 2001;Vaughan, 2015). Reformers mapped and counted the numbers of doors pubs had because they were worried about their porosity, their connections to streets and homes, allowing patrons and influences to flow in and out (Kneale, 1999(Kneale, , 2012. Beckingham (2017a, pp. 85-124) presents careful readings of a series of these maps created in late nineteenth-century Liverpool, and lists others produced elsewhere. Drink maps were also created in the United States, for very similar purposes (Levine, 1983;Vaughan, 2015).

| PATRONS AND WORKERS
While drinking places could be spatial problems, observers also worried about the people who used them, particularly women bar workers or customers in what were thought to be masculine spaces. Brian Harrison described the British pub as "a 'masculine republic' on every street" (1973, p. 172), borrowing the phrase from H. W.
J. Edwards' description of Rhondda pubs (1938). For Valerie Hey (1986), the pub provided a "female substitute" for British men, another "flight from domesticity." Of course, women owned, ran, and worked in drinking places. For Haine, a "female presence behind the bar ensured that Paris cafés were not ordinary patriarchal spaces" (1996, p. 185). Glamourous images of the British "barmaid" (Bailey, 1990) co-existed with descriptions of the long hours, hard work, and harassment experienced by many women workers in drinking places (Kirkby, 1997;Poutanen, 2017;Upton, 2013). These women were cause for concern in Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, and Britain at different points in our period (Beckingham, 2017b;Kirkby, 1997;Peleggi, 2012;Poutanen, 2017;Upton, 2013). In Mexico, both wealthy white women tavern-owners and the Indigenous women who sold food outside them faced criticism as "nuisances" or worse (Toxqui, 2014); in Bolivia, between 1870 and 1930 chicheras, women selling maize beer, were accused of criminality and sexual impropriety, often by elite male patrons (Hames, 2003). But a domestic family life was possible in some family-owned British establishments (Booth, 2018) and Mary Anne Poutanen suggests that the "blurring of … social and spatial boundaries" in Montreal's tavern spaces appealed to women (2017, p. 45).

KNEALE -5 of 14
There is broad agreement that women made up a significant proportion of British pub patrons in this period but were rarely as common as men (Beckingham, 2012;Gutzke, 1984Gutzke, , 1994Gutzke, , 2013Langhamer, 2000;Moss, 2008Moss, , 2009Robinson, 2015). There were exceptions, of course. In late Victorian London compartments-or even whole pubs-might be dominated by women (Gleiss, 2009, p. 56;Jennings, 2007, pp. 116-117), with the writer Arthur Machen complaining of a "monstrous incursion of women" into London's pubs (2015, p. 91). Ellen Ross suggests that a "women's pub culture" provided a crucial support network in Edwardian London (1983, p. 10). The attention paid to women's drinking after the 1908 Children Act made British pubs less welcoming for them (Orwell, 1946;Moss, 2008Moss, , 2009, though women returned to pubs in greater numbers during the Second World War (Gutzke, 2013;Langhamer, 2003).
Elsewhere significant numbers of women were present in drinking places in Australia (Kirkby, 1997), Canada (Campbell, 2001;Hamilton, 2004;Malleck, 2012), Guatemala (Carey, 2014), and Russia (Phillips, 2000) in this period. In British East Africa licensed spaces attracted both men and women, though that worried white administrators and educated Africans (Willis, 2002, pp. 10, 104-105). Women drinkers were rarely as common as men, though. In the United States, Madelon Powers suggests that "the saloon trade regarded women as a special and separate class of customers" (1998, p. 32); in Bogorodsk in 1859, men were everyday drinkers, while women joined them for communal holiday drinking (Transchel, 2006, p. 23); and in twentieth-century French cafés, women drank less frequently than men (Prestwich, 1988, p. 90).
Studies of American and British "gay male worlds" suggest licensed premises could be key spaces for queer sociability in this period. While a new-and more hostile-attention was paid to New York's gay men after the Repeal of Prohibition, and San Francisco's bars faced hostile policing (Boyd, 2003;Chauncey, 1994), Seattle's gay bars were "governed heteronormatively but … indirectly and with a relatively soft touch" by the Liquor Control Board (Brown & Knopp, 2016, p. 337). London's pubs were no more important than other third places in this period (Houlbrook, 2005), however.
Finally, drinking places also enforced separations based on racialized lines, with alcohol forbidden to African Americans before the end of the Civil War and to Native Americans from the start of the nineteenth century (Herd, 1991;Ishii, 2008). Similar restrictions on Indigenous drinking existed in Canada until 1951 (Campbell, 2001;Heron, 2003;Malleck, 2012) and in Australia from the 1830s (Brady, 2019). In other places, like the European hotels of Colombo and Singapore, drinking places could be "contact zones,", "where different social, ethnic, and national groups interacted," though excessive alcohol consumption was "an identity marker that set Westerners apart" (Peleggi, 2012, pp. 125, 138).
Much of the work of enforcing these exclusions was left to licensing systems, and the next section explores work on this important topic in some detail, with the section after that concentrating on drinking places explicitly designed to improve their customers and workers.

| REGULATION: LICENSING
A powerful but subtle technology of liberal governmentality, licensing focuses "on particular spaces, temporalities, and activities," effectively "contracting out the governmental work of preventing disorder and monitoring risks to the private sector" (Valverde, 2003, p. 147). Licensing records provide very different accounts to narratives of the pub's domestication; London's police struggled to convict drinksellers though they successfully prosecuted tens of thousands of drunks (e.g., Jennings, 2013). Licensing authorities dreamed of order though this was often limited by local factors. David Beckingham's exploration of licensing has been enormously productive (2017a, 2017b, 2017c). Licensing was always local, a form of "small and cautious government" where "local influences shaped individual licensing outcomes in remarkably uneven ways" (2017a, p. 44). Between 1830 and 1920, the city of Liverpool experimented with different kinds of licensing, as "the permissive framing of legislation created the spaces for drink coalitions to 6 of 14 -KNEALE occupy and so shape everyday local policies" (2017a, p. 250). The hostile attention paid to barmaids in Edwardian Glasgow provides another excellent example, demonstrating licensing's extraordinarily flexible engagement with different elements: drinking places themselves, the objects and people inhabiting them, rhythms of working and drinking (2017b). Beckingham's work on the city of Motherwell's short-lived prohibition of the sale of spirits in 1916 shows that the scales of action required to make and then challenge this ban were actively made by many agents, some of them outside the licensing system (2017c, and see Lester [2014] for another example of jurisdictional differences).
Histories of Mexico City's pulquerías show authorities responding to the same issues that were troubling British licensing authorities. From the 1850s authorities made increasingly insistent demands for improvement; seats and tables were to be removed and the bar positioned immediately inside the entrance to discourage loitering (Toner, 2011;Toxqui, 2014;Toxqui Garay, 2008). As Beckingham's work demonstrates, licensing strategies produce very different outcomes in different contexts. Both Chicago and Boston were 'high license' cities from the early 1880s, for example, as the cities charged a high price for the right to sell alcohol, but their drinking places became recognizably different (Duis, 1983). Boston limited the number of licenses, so every bar prospered though there was no incentive for owners to improve them. In Chicago, where there was no cap on numbers, the cost of licenses prompted intense competition, leading to extravagant interiors and the provision of entertainment and food.
In Ireland, nineteenth-century legislation and policing "shap [ed] the pub into a controlled and well-ordered environment" (Malcolm, 1998, pp. 71, 72). In other colonial contexts, licensing and prohibition were tools of both administration and "development." In 1917, the British took over the production, sale, and consumption of all alcohol in Uganda, also banning ebirabo (clubs for sale of local drinks), off-sales and public drinking in the Buganda kingdom (Willis, 2002). These "Native Liquor Ordinances" were extended a decade later, though ebirabo were now encouraged and regulated rather than prohibited. In Southern Africa, drink could only be bought through stateowned or licensed outlets by the start of the twentieth century. Drink shops supplied camps and migration routes in Mozambique and the Witwatersrand, while other employers prohibited alcohol from their compounds; "employers and local authorities in towns and cities combined not to destroy the liquor trade but to seize control of it, shape it to their needs, and profit from it" (Ambler & Crush, 1992, p. 18).
The 6 PM early closing legislation adopted in New Zealand, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania during the First World War also changed drinking places (Blainey, 2003). Consumption seems to have remained high, as drinkers drank more in the hour between finishing work and closing time-the "six o'clock swill"but it made drinking places less attractive as "anything that interfered with the fast and efficient dispensing of drink was thrown out" (Phillips, 1980, pp. 251, 250).
Licensing also shaped the character of unlicensed drinking places, including American "blind pigs" (Duis, 1983), British "jerries" or "whisht-," "hush-," or "wabble-" shops (Jennings, 2016;Lambert, 1983), Polish melinas selling moonshine bimber (Kochanowski, 2017), and the Irish "shebeen," a word adopted in Scotland, the United States, and many parts of Africa. Russia women acted as bootleggers and illegal sellers before the Revolution (Herlihy, 2002) and the illegal spaces opened up by US Prohibition allowed women patrons and workers into drinking places in greater numbers (Gutzke & Law, 2017;Murphy, 1994). Elsewhere, some women were displaced into other licensed sites. Between 1791 and 1910 Irish spirit grocers sold spirits for consumption off the premises, though drinking in the shop was thought to be widespread (Kearns, 1996;Martin, 2016). In much the same way, British pastrycooks' shops became associated with respectable women's 'secret drinking' after the Refreshment Houses Act of 1860 (Bonea et al., 2019).
The next section concerns two excellent examples of licensing's influence that attracted support around the world, with (again) very different outcomes. KNEALE -7 of 14 6 | REGULATION: "GOTHENBURG" AND IMPROVEMENT Two linked developments had important consequences for drinking places in Scandinavia, North America, and Britain and its empire in this period: the "Gothenburg system" and the search for "improved" drinking places.
The Gothenburg system was named after Göteborg's "disinterested management" scheme (1865). The municipal authority established a private company, granted it a monopoly on spirit sales, and took the profits, with supporters receiving dividends on their investments. Removing the profit motive reduced consumption, eliminated the incentive to sell drink illegally, and made implementing reforms "a mere matter of administration" (Rowntree & Sherwell, 1899, p. 274). Drink sales funded amenities usually seen as alternatives to the drink trade, like eating houses and reading rooms. One British observer described Bergen's company bars as offering "no attractions whatever, except drink. They have no resemblance to bright gin-palaces, nor to bright coffee taverns, nor yet to 'snug' public-houses. They are not places of resort for social intercourse" (in Rowntree & Sherwell, 1899, p. 301).
Patrons were not allowed food, games, newspapers, or chairs.
The first British companies of this kind opened in the 1890s, reaching their peak in the 1920s (Gutzke, 2003). In 1915, when the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic) sought to manage drinking in places where essential war work was being done, Gothenburg offered an obvious model. The CCB closed some of the pubs it took over, improved others, and built new ones in North London, Cromarty Firth, Carlisle, and Gretna Green, eventually extending its influence across the United Kingdom (Duncan, 2013;White, 2014). Carlisle's pubs remained in state control until 1974.
The CCB clearly inspired elements of what became known as the "improved pub," but the meaning of and reason for improvement shifted, from moral reform to wartime national efficiency, ending as a commercial imperative (Greenaway, 1998). The improved pub was shaped by forward-thinking breweries who saw a convergence between their own interests and those of reformers (Gutzke, 2005); "improvement" meant providing amenities that would slow down drinking in profitable ways. Improved pubs have received a good deal of attention, from their commercial origins to an extensive analysis of their forms, the amenities they offered, and their relationship with interwar social housing construction (Fisher and Preston, 2015, 2018Boak & Bailey, 2017;Cole, 2015;Fisher, 2009;Gutzke, 2005;Jennings, 2007). Their designs often suggest an attempt to organize pub space in reforming ways, however, raising familiar questions of visibility and privacy (Fisher & Preston, 2019;Moss, 2009). Still, not all interwar drinking places were concerned with respectability; roadhouses were both "smart" and "racy" (e.g., Gutzke & Law, 2017;Law, 2009).
'Gothenburg' travelled on through Britain's empire. Hotels operating on these principles opened in Australia from 1897, generating income for municipal projects (Brady, 2019). Gothenburg also offered Britain's African colonies a significant source of funds for development. In 1909 Durban's municipal government established a monopoly in making and selling beer, managing African drinking while funding housing and sanitation. Southern Rhodesia and Johannesburg soon followed suit (La Hausse, 1988Parry, 1992;Rogerson, 1992). The beerhall-funded construction of townships, residential compounds and recreational spaces for Africans further spatialized ethnic divisions (Ambler & Crush, 1992). Municipal halls were opened in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, and elsewhere between the 1920s and 1940s (Willis 2002(Willis , 2003. African halls resembled Bergen's company bars; "in the clubs of Nairobi and Mombasa, with their brick and wire-mesh walls, turnstiles, and 'stalwart attendants,' the cheerless colonial vision of urban drinking as a physiological function came closest to realization" (Willis, 2002, p. 129). In Southern Africa, "beerhalls were bleak functional buildings with little character and no charm, as befitted their purpose" (Ambler & Crush, 1992, p. 25). This "improvement" was a long way from the comfortable interwar British pub.
Post-Prohibition Canada offers interesting parallels. Dan Malleck's insightful analysis of public drinking in Ontario supports Beckingham's argument that licensing is always local. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) licensed and monitored privately owned hotels across the province, attempting to govern space and people in the most productive arrangement possible, "a form of generative rationality" producing better conduct (2012, p. 8 of 14 -KNEALE 65, original emphasis). However this often involved a case-by-case compromise between idealism and pragmatism (2012, p. 64). The "two aspects of the architectural ideal of hotels that governed the morality of the hotel's patrons were surveillance and segregation," just as they had been for British pubs in the 1890s (p. 73). The LCBO insisted on separate rooms for men and women from 1934; staff should be able to see patrons easily, but the public should not be able to see in from the street, and men and women should not be able to see each other, except in women's rooms where "escorts" were allowed.
The "beer parlors" that reintroduced public drinking into British Columbia in 1924 shared some similarities with Ontario's hotels. Patrons had to sit to drink in poorly lit, uncomfortable rooms; food, cigarettes and soft drinks were all prohibited. Separate rooms, with separate entrances, were introduced for women customers in 1927.
Seattle's Liquor Board insisted that patrons of gay bars were served and drank at tables, though these bars were more appealing than Vancouver's beer parlors (Brown & Knopp, 2016;Campbell, 2001;Hamilton, 2004). The form of these "improved" sites reflected and shaped questions of class, race, and sexuality.

| CONCLUSIONS
These historical geographies and histories of drinking places offer insights into specific issues, which I will briefly recap here before considering avenues for future research. The first important question is the hybrid (public/private, working/domestic) or "third" character of these sites. While interesting, we need to do more to challenge these long-standing and simplistic binary oppositions (Vickery, 1993), perhaps by engaging with a broader set of research materials (Andersson, 2015). A re-evaluation of the idea of "domestication" (Koch & Latham, 2013) might help, as well as a loosening of the idea of place meanings as already given. This might also allow us to extend our analysis to sites like homes, or colonial ships, messes and barracks (Goodman, 2020). Alternatively, we might put public drinking into its wider context as only one of the ways in which alcohol becomes public (Kneale, 2014).
The second point concerns the importance of the relationships between licensing, business and policing as they come together in specific places. Perhaps appropriately, much of the best work considered above-Beckingham, Brown and Knopp, Malleck, Moss-has focused on "the local": on particular, often unspectacular, articulations of people, regulation, and objects. There is still a good deal of potential in comparative analyses of licensing, given the variety of spaces it manages and the multiplicity of outcomes it produces.
Finally, there are three areas of historical-geographical or historical work that seem very promising for future research. The first might extend and synthesize work on imperial alcohol, looking back to earlier commodity chains linked to the trade in sugar and enslaved Africans (Carey, 2015;Courtwright, 2001;Mandelblatt, 2011;Mintz, 1985;Ogborn, 2008). Government taxes on alcohol funded colonial development, contributing 52%-68% of the revenue of the Lagos Colony between 1892 and 1903 (Olorunfemi, 1984, p. 237), and 62%-74% of the revenue of French West Africa between 1908 and 1913 (Pan, 1975, p. 16). Again, what might comparisons of drinking places in imperial Russia, India, and African colonies show us? The second might follow Ruth Slatter in attending to the mobile assemblages of material things that make up apparently closed and static places (2019a, 2019b, 2019c).
Jugs and 'growlers' connected pubs with homes, as stolen drinking vessels roamed local neighbourhoods (Owens et al., 2010;Owens & Jeffries, 2016). Bottles turn up in Victorian rubbish heaps and can help to trace the material geographies of Prohibition in the United States (Licence, 2015; Mosher & Wilkie, 2010). The last area that might receive more attention concerns alcohol itself: what makes pubs different to "great good places" like barbershops, for example? Perhaps we need to think about what the "affective potential of alcohol" might mean for these sites (Latham & McCormack, 2004, p. 717).