What makes the perfect pub?

From Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tabard and Martin Amis’s Black Cross to Thomas Hardy’s Buck’s Head Inn, literature is as replete with pubs as are villages and high streets up and down the land. It is no surprise. They are atmospheric settings for a plot, and places of inspiration and contemplation besides; many authors have written their novels while sitting within them. Above all, they are one of the essential stitches in the fabric of British life. In the words of Hilaire Belloc: ‘But when you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves – for you will have lost the last of England.’

Before my father came to this country in 1971 from East Africa, he read that the British socialised in pubs. That’s where I need to go, he thought, to make friends, integrate into society and become an Englishman. And so when he arrived here, having finished the shift on his first day of work, it was to a pub that he went.