Finance, Financial Entrepreneurship and the British Pub

There is a long history of financial entrepreneurship in the UK brewing and pub market. Indeed, the fledgling market for corporate control that developed in the 1950s brought outside interest from notable financiers. Such entrepreneurship was generally seen as prompting constructive changes to a traditional and patriarchal industry. However, following the 1989 anti-trust investigation in the beer industry – the Beer Orders - a wave of financial entrepreneurship was unleashed that has left a less desirable mark on the pub market. Our paper seeks to explain why the recent interjection of financiers might have created more problems than the Beer Orders hoped it would solve. As many of the financially-driven structures are in the process of being unwound, firms and regulators alike might wish to ponder whether the pre Beer Orders vertical integration might not act in the public interest after all, especially as the only response to tackling binge drinking seem to hang on raising prices once again