The Relation of Village and Rural Pubs with Community Life and People’s Well-Being in Great Britain

Abstract

In Great Britain the make-up of rural communities is changing. Young individuals are moving to cities and the population of rural communities is ageing. In this context, it is important to sustain and enhance people’s well-being and community cohesion. The purpose of this paper is to show that pubs are important facilitators of community cohesion and ultimately well-being of residents. This is done by compiling a database of secondary data at the parish level of rural communities of England. From this data, measures of community cohesion and social interaction are derived and correlated with the number of pubs within the parish. Pubs are found to be statistically significantly positively associated with community cohesion and social interaction. The paper goes on to construct regression and path models to relate the number of pubs and community cohesion and interaction to self-reported health as a proxy for well-being. Significant positive associations are again found. These findings provide a strong case to foster the sustainability of rural pubs.