Did you drink, eat, work at or run a gastropub between 1990-1998? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re especially interested in diary entries, letters, articles, emails or other records you might have made at the time — nothing is too scrappy or too minor.

But memories are helpful too.

We’ve got lots of facts, dates and figures: what we want to know is, how did these places feel?

Like journalist Kathryn Flett, a great champion of gastropubs in the 1990s, did you appreciate their un-blokey atmosphere and rustic chic? Did you welcome the opportunity to enjoy good food without having to dress, mind your table manners and take out a small bank loan?

Or perhaps you’re with Patrick Harveson who, in 1995, wrote an article in the Times calling for The Campaign for Real Pubs. Did your local became somewhere you no longer felt you could pop in for a pint? Maybe you saw the very idea of the gastropub as dangerous — a threat to the very idea of what pubs are meant to be.

The Eagle in Clerkenwell, London, generally given credit as the original gastropub after its 1991 reinvention, is one we’re particularly focusing on but we’d be happy to hear about any others you think are notable or interesting.

You can comment below but it’d be much more useful if you could email us via contact@boakandbailey.com.

Thanks!

Main image adapted from ‘Eagle, Clerkenwell, EC1’ by Ewan Munro (Pubology.co.uk) via Flickr under Creative Commons.

HELP US: Gastropubs in the 1990s originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog