With pubs being one of the locations most affected by indoor smoking ban of 2007, had it not been for the advent of the pub garden it’s safe to assume that a lot of pubs would’ve gone under during that initial transitioning period.
For the pubs that found themselves without the capital to open a beer garden this time would’ve been difficult to get through. To bridge the gap between expectations and reality, a number of pubs across the country opted to purchase and install an outdoor smoking shelter.
Depending on the space available, a pub has a number of options available to them. budget conscious customers will appreciate the sub £1000 price tag of the Best Buy Smoking Shelter, and its simple 4-piece assembly.
Smoking in the UK
The inhalation of tobacco products have been a popular pastime in Britain since the day the product hit the market. Although the first reports of people smoking appeared in 1556, the first tobacco processing factory to open in the UK was in 1786, the founding of W. D. & H. O. Wills’ in Bristol.
A small firm at the time, the Wills company focused on the processing of high quality pipe tobacco, which was the most popular method of intake at the time. Cigarettes did exist but as they had to be hand rolled, production could only reach 2 or 3 per minute per worker. It wasn’t until the invention of the cigarette rolling machine that tobacco became cheap enough to be sold as a staple of the working man.
As time progressed and technology improved, smoking in the UK only gained in popularity. The mainstream adoption of the cigarette challenged peoples traditional understanding of the cigarette into something that better represented the working class.
The Ban
According to the General Lifestyle Study of 1974 over 45% of the UK population smoked tobacco in one form or another, with 50% of men smoking on a regular basis vs 40% of women. This lead to a number of health conditions and increasing costs for the NHS which couldn’t be ignored.
Over the course of the following decades MPs and councillors came together to design the Health Act of 2006, which restricted the places that someone could choose to smoke by banning smoking indoors.
One of the businesses hit the hardest by this change were free-houses and pubs, which relied on smokers as a significant proportion of their revenue. The indoor smoking ban lead smokers outdoors with their pints for the first time since summer, and after experiencing the full force of the British weather realised they’re going to need a solution to their new reality.
Solutions
It was during this in-between stage of British recreation that smoking shelters got their start. The Shelter Expert released their very first smoking shelter in 2007, just one year after the indoor smoking ban. The flat roof smoking shelter was an instant hit, with orders placed for locations across the country.
The addition of a Shelter Expert smoking shelter allowed smokers to join their friends and family for an evening at the pub and still enjoy their habit in a convenient location, while adhering to the latest smoking shelter regulations set out by the British government which mandated a minimum 50% open area for any shelter that might be sold as a smoking shelter.
The government brought this legislation into effect to maintain the highest possible levels of user safety, ensuring that any airborne nicotine has plenty of open area to filter out from underneath the shelter, which in turn allows smokers the luxury of a clean breath of fresh air whilst in the shelter (in much opposition to a traditional smoking room, where even the thought of entering will leave you with tobacco stains on your jacket), but also allows any non smokers that may see a benefit in using the unit from being subjected to the unhealthy cigarette smoke and the unappealing smell that comes with it.
