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All in Pubs
Just a few decades ago, Nottingham’s skyline was punctuated by iconic brewery buildings producing beers that were part of the city’s DNA. The famous Shipstone’s star, and the Robin Hood silhouette of Home Ales, proudly adorned those buildings. Streets hummed with the pungent scents of malt and hops, and hundreds of pubs carried their names.
In the 1980s beer culture went hand-in-hand with mining here in the East Midlands. Back then, the brewing industry in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was thriving, and many of the collieries were yet to experience peak production. A pint of mild or bitter wasn’t a curated lifestyle choice; it was a hard-earned punctuation mark at the end of every laborious day. Best enjoyed in jam-packed, smoky welfare halls where the air was thick with chatter, and the drink was unmistakably familiar.
Across the road from the White Rose, a pair of neatly dressed women hand us a phone. “Could we be cheeky and get a picture?” It strikes me as an unremarkable request: a quick souvenir of the first pub on the Mumbles Mile, to be followed by messier selfies as the night goes on. But I’ve misread things completely.
On a clear day in Glynde, staff at The Trevor Arms can look to the peak of nearby Mount Caburn—the crowning point of a well-trodden path for South Downs walkers setting off from the town of Lewes—and predict how busy they’ll be that afternoon.
Since the pub reopened in the summer of 2025, after standing empty for eight years, the answer to that question has usually been the same: very busy indeed.
Today, John runs the Smog with his son, Cameron, known to friends and regulars as Boomer. He took the plunge on the pub after travelling to Belgium and Germany, which made him realise that the beer choice was generally poor in Stockton’s pubs. There were the town’s bankers—the nearby Sun Inn is famous for serving pints of Bass with cumulonimbus-like heads—but John argues that this strong local beer culture has held back Stockton.
Hopleaf Bar—referred to most commonly as just “Hopleaf” or, sometimes locally, “the Hopleaf”—is a loosely Belgian-inspired pub that has played an outsized role in the development of the city’s, and the country’s, beer scenes over the last 30-plus years. Even still, it has never lost its identity as a community meeting place. It’s both a local for many Chicagoans and a destination for pilgrims seeking this holy land of beer.
