STILL SERVING

Bar leaners, beer-branded towels and sticky floors. Kids jazzed up on raspberry and lemonade being sent out back to the garden bar to play on shonky picnic tables. Loud bands and queues for the ladies’loos. Floral wallpaper, swirly carpet, and a shared, Formica-clad bathroom down the hall. The Kiwi pub has been part of our culture since the very first European settlements, developing from simple grog shops for thirsty whalers into purveyors of accommodation and stabling along with alcoholic refreshment, then into the brewery-dominated “booze barns” of the 1960s and 70s.

The heyday of the New Zealand hotel was the 1890s, with more than 1700 venues operating around the country — one for every 420 people. Since then, changes to the way people travel and socialise has seen the number of traditional pubs fall away. After 150 years of domination in the hospitality trade, their decline was relatively swift: it’s estimated that one-third of all pubs around the country had shut down by 2001.

Kiwi pubs had a dual role from the very beginning, based on the English inn model, says