Times have changed for women at the local

They will have grown up hearing stories from their mothers and grandmothers, handed down in turn by their own grandmothers, about the days when only disreputable women patronised public houses unless accompanied by a responsible male adult, preferably a husband.

Times have changed. Now women can go into pubs alone or in groups, order their drinks and/or their meals, and no-one will give them a disapproving glance. That was presumably the case, too, at the end of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century when women used to crowd into town-centre pubs knocking back gin, whisky and cheap brandy, some of them smoking pipes.

Paul Jennings reports in his new book, The Local, that it was claimed in 1853 that nearly half of the people in the spirit vaults in Manchester's Deansgate on a Saturday were women. Women were noted to make up more than 40 per cent of those entering London's 14 leading "gin shops" which were surveyed for a week in 1853 (such surveys are nothing new, it seems). More than half a century earlier, it was noted at the West Riding Quarter Sessions that many women and children were among customers of the dram shops in the area.

So how did pubs and women come to acquire such a negative joint reputation? As Paul Jennings's book reveals, it wasn't so much the booze as the sex. Beerhouses were often the places where men and women got together, arranged it, and in many cases did it. Sometimes it was just casual sex done for fun but often there was a commercial element, turning it into prostitution.

"In Bradford the chief constable of the new borough police force produced figures for beerhouses where prostitutes lodged, or which had adjoining properties used for prostitution, showing a peak of 27 of the former in 1856, comprising about ten per cent of the beerhouses in the town," writes the pub and drink expert who teaches history within the School of Lifelong Education and Development at the University of Bradford. One of them was the Huddersfield Arms where landlady Lavinia Kingston appeared in court after charging customers 4d a time to hire a private room..

"Her conviction was part of something of a purge, which reduced the number of brothel beerhouses to just four in 1857," writes Mr Jennings.

Examples of depravity in public houses no doubt helped to fuel this purge. The clerk to the Bradford Justices told a parliamentary committee how at a Bradford beerhouse "dice were thrown for a pretty girl of loose character" and the man who threw the highest number then "bedded the girl in broad daylight". In Portsmouth the landlord of the Battle of Inkerman gained such a reputation for specialising in the provision of young girls that his pub became known as the "Infant School".

New laws in 1869 and 1872 helped to bring to an end the use of public houses for sex. Publicans who kept a brothel could lose their licence for life. Prostitutes were still allowed into pubs, but only to obtain "reasonable refreshment", not to tout for business.

And so, gradually, pubs cleaned up their act. But as the Victorian era matured, the collective mood of women swung against frequenting them, except maybe in the company of their husbands on a Saturday night.

Paul Jennings reports: "The use of pubs by women declined over the nineteenth century, and those that did were overwhelmingly from the poorer classes in towns and cities."

Which is no doubt why some of those ladies of a certain age from a certain background still feel uneasy about venturing into pubs. If the historically dubious morality of the places doesn't keep them away, snobbery will.

The above is but one small aspect of The Local, a meticulously-written, thorough, informative and entertaining history of the English public house from its emergence as a specifically-identified type of drinking establishment at the end of the 17th century to its constantly-changing present.

• The Local, by Paul Jennings, is published by Tempus at £20.