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.