Pubs for the People: An Evening with Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan

Amit Singh and Sivamohan Valluvan are coming to Waterstones, Trafalgar Square on Thursday 22 October, starting at 19:00, to talk about their book Pubs for the People. It's a defence of the English public house, and they're framing the pub as a lens on national identity rather than just a symbol of a bygone England. The two authors are both sociologists, and they've built the book around the story of Singh's father, who founded London's first 'Desi pub'.

From there, the book works as a travelogue that takes 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, so it's as much about who owns and runs the pub as it is about the drinking itself. The evening is chaired by writer and broadcaster Pete Brown.

Singh is a sociologist at University College London and wrote Cancelled Futures: Class, Race, and Place in Post-Industrial Britain (2026); in another life, he says he would have been a fourth-generation publican. Valluvan is a sociologist at the University of Warwick and wrote The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (2019), with writing in the Guardian, Renewal, Salvage, Red Pepper and Progressive Review. They'll be talking through the book and the ideas behind it, with Brown leading the conversation.

It's at Waterstones, Trafalgar Square (WC2N 5EJ) on Thursday 22 October from 19:00. A book and ticket together are £22, or general admission is £6 if you're just coming for the talk.