Join us for an evening talking pubs and pints as we welcome authors Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan as they celebrate their latest book

Join us for an evening talking pubs and pints as we welcome authors Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan as they celebrate their latest book Pubs for the People. A heartfelt case for why the English pub still matters and how we can save it Pubs for the People offers a daring defense of the humble public house, waging battle against those who see the pub only as a poignant symbol of a bygone England. Chaired by author Pete Brown the evening will be a rich exploration of national identity through the beloved institution, the pub.

Pubs for the People

Making a journey into the nation’s living room, Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan blend tales of Singh’s father – the founder of London’s first ‘Desi pub’ – with a lively travelogue that carries them from a hipster nightmare in Shoreditch to an izakaya-inspired Eccles pub run by migrants from Hong Kong. Along the way, they take on private equity, yuppie gentrifiers and culture-war blowhards who use the pub as a prop for their rage-baiting patriotism.

Life today can seem lonelier, angrier and poorer than it did before. But as Singh and Valluvan show, the pub offers the inviting prospect of a more equal, sociable and comfortably multiracial England.

Amit Singh is a sociologist at University College London. He is the author of Cancelled Futures: Class, Race, and Place in Post-Industrial Britain (2026). He would, in another life, have been a fourth-generation publican.

Sivamohan Valluvan is a sociologist at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (2019). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Renewal, Salvage, Red Pepper and Progressive Review.

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