Kmflett's Blog

Lockdown: A sense of place and time. The importance of closing time

The working class did not arise like the sun at an appointed time, it was present at its own making

E P Thompson, Making of the English Working Class

Glennie and Nigel Thrift’s 2009 volume Shaping the Day looks at changing ideas about the measurement of time in Bristol- primarily because that City has maintained good records of municipal and commercial affairs over a lengthy period.

One place where those with little or no access to what the time was (many people before the C19th) could find out the time in most cases was the pub clock. Glennie and Thrift quoting Jonathan Barry estimate that early C18th Bristol had between 600 and 700 pubs that is one for every 56 inhabitants.

Not every pub had a clock but most did to allow them to enforce licensing hours and to give drinkers a way of checking how much drinking time they had and perhaps more particularly to be sure that licensing magistrates were aware that they were doing so.

Jonathan Barry suggests that in the eighteenth century official pub closing times tended to be related more closely to hours of daylight meaning 9pm in winter and 10pm in summer. Whether the clock or the fading of the light was more significant here is not clear.

For Thompson plebeian culture, pre-industrial working patterns, did not have a ‘predictive’ sense of time. That is people did not plan out their day or week, with so many hours work, so many hours leisure and so on. Rather time was seized as of the moment. If there was little or no work to do, then an extended amount of time might be spent in a pub for example.

The role of the pub clock not only provided order to drinking time and hours, it also reflected the change to a measured and disciplined pattern of working time.

Nowadays of course most people have watches or check the time on their mobiles but the ringing of last orders and of time in a pub is still one of the more distinctive ways that time is marked in any day.

And with lockdown the structure to the day that means the pub (mostly)closes at 11pm Mon-Thurs and probably a bit later on Fri-Sat is absent.

That doesn’t mean I spend my time drinking during the day (there is work to do) but the rhythm of life around a beer or two at a specific time is missing. A sense of time and place is missing.