Abstract

This poster showcases my PhD research which made use of interviews to explore and understand how people perceive and experience the village pub. My research helps fill the knowledge gap that exists in rural studies literature on village services. By using empirical data my research provides an in-depth exploration and interpretation of the values underpinning the research participants’ representations and experiences of the village pub. In doing this, it shows that village pubs are seen and experienced as adding value of different kinds – economic, social, and cultural, and that different groups attach different levels of importance to these kinds of value. It also shows that, whilst the different kinds of value can work in the Bourdieusian interpretation as capital, and be self-expanding and inter-convertible, they can also work to undermine one another. By showing how the village pub is seen through the lens of nostalgia and the rural idyll and that contradictions exist between how the village pub is remembered or imagined and how it ‘really’ is, my research contributes to rural studies literature and, to pub literature. My research also offers a contribution to practice. It does this by imparting knowledge, to different groups, on the types (economic, social and cultural) of diversification that can be used to help sustain village pubs, especially in Lincolnshire.