Laura Thompson’s grandmother Violet was one of the great landladies. Born in a London pub, she became the first woman to be given a publican’s licence in her own name. Just as pubs defined her life, she seemed in many ways to embody their essence.

Laura spent part of her childhood in Violet’s Home Counties establishment, mesmerised by her gift for cultivating the mix of cosiness and glamour that defined the pub’s atmosphere, making it a unique reflection of the national character. Her memories of this time are just as intoxicating: beer and ash on the carpets in the morning, the deepening rhythms of mirth at night, the magical brightness of glass behind the bar…

Through them Laura traces the story of the English pub, asking why it has occupied such a treasured position in our culture. But even Violet, as she grew older, recognised that places like hers were a dying breed, and Laura also considers the precarious future they face. 

Part memoir, part social history, part elegy, The Last Landlady pays tribute to an extraordinary woman and the world she epitomised. It was selected as a Spectator book of the year in 2018.

‘A lyrical portrait of a fast-vanishing way of life . . . Thompson is a terrific writer’ 

‘The Last Landlady is Laura Thompson's exquisitely observed and brilliantly written memoir of the life and times of her grandmother, the first woman in England to hold a pub licence’ 

‘A wonderfully observed story about female agency in the post-war period’ 

Laura is a writer, journalist and Oxford graduate. She won the Somerset Maugham Award for her first book The Dogs, and is the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Nancy Mitford, Life in a Cold Climate; The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters; and Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. While living in Newmarket wrote two books about horse racing.