Studies of alcohol in the British Isles invariably also encompass histories of public houses. A good general history of the public house in England is The Local: A History of the English Pub, by Paul Jennings. For an early history of the drinking establishments that predated the pub, readers should consult Mark Hailwood’s Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England. David W. Gutzke has written two useful histories of the pub between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. His book The Mystique of Running the Public House in England investigates aspiring publicans’ hopes for wealth, status, and respectability, despite the very slim likelihood of achieving that dream, while his study Pubs and Progressives considers how brewers sought to shift the societal perception of public drinking to make public houses more respectable. Robert Duncan’s Pubs and Patriots considers national concerns over drinking during World War I and the resulting efforts to control public drinking habits. The Roadhouse Comes to Britain, by David W. Gutzke and Michael John Law, considers a later iteration of the public house, the roadhouse, treating the cultural impact of this establishment in the first half of the twentieth century.
Books that look beyond England include Bradley Kadel’s Drink and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, which considers the public house in Ireland as a hub of important social networks that wielded influence over national politics in the nineteenth century. For Scotland, there is Anthony Cooke’s A History of Drinking, which offers a social history of Scottish pubs since 1700.
Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England by 
The Mystique of Running the Public House in England by 
