Edinburgh Napier University

  In Great Britain the make-up of rural communities is changing. Young individuals are moving to cities and the population of rural communities is ageing. In this context, it is important to sustain and enhance people’s well-being and community cohesion. Community cohesion is measured here by the degree to which people can participate in local activities, the availability of an infrastructure to allow social integration and the presence of local shops and food available. The purpose of this paper is to show that public houses are important facilitators of community cohesion and ultimately well-being of residents. This is done by compiling a database of secondary data at the parish level of rural communities of England. From this data, measures of community cohesion and social interaction are derived and correlated with the number of public houses within the parish. Public houses are found to be statistically significantly positively associated with community cohesion and social interaction. The paper goes on to construct regression and path models to relate the number of public houses and community cohesion and interaction to self reported health as a proxy for well-being. Significant positive associations are again found. These findings provide a strong case to foster the sustainability of rural public houses.