‘Called to the Bar: Serious Leisure, Consumer Protest and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA)'

Since its formation in 1971, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) has been a frequent, if at times contentious and often derided, voice in debates relating to British drinking culture, the drinks industry and, by association, contemporary leisure. This paper explores the various ways in which CAMRA has sought to challenge and influence consumer tastes, brewing industry practice and government policy. Notably, during the 1970s and 1980s, CAMRA launched a string of attacks on the small number of large breweries that had, through aggressive takeovers and conglomeration, come to dominate the British drinks industry as the ‘Big Six’. By analysing both CAMRA’s early activities and contemporary campaigns, it is possible to see how the meaning of beer consumption and ale appreciation as a leisure practice has been fiercely contested over time. The paper presents findings drawn from extensive interviews with both salaried campaign staff and grass roots level volunteers. Drawing on Stebbins’ notion of ‘serious leisure’, the paper will detail how involvement in CAMRA as a consumer movement and social network provides participants with a means for expressing both personal identity and a collective orientation to contemporary developments in the commercialisation, rationalisation and regulation of leisure and consumption. The paper concludes by reflecting on the wider temporal nature of the campaign which incorporates elements of nostalgia, utopian idealism and resistance to corporate, neo-liberal, agendas of market ‘progress’.