How did we get here? History of Scotland's drinking culture

How did we get here?

1950-1987: Beer, wine, and warnings

In the post-war years, most drinking was done in pubs by men and British-brewed pale ales (typically 3% strength) were the beverage of choice.

According to beer writer Peter Brown, "men who worked in factories and mines would drink pints and pints of it after work, partially to rehydrate without getting hammered."

For women, going to a pub would be social taboo, and very little drinking was done at home: spirits, such as whisky and gin, were prohibitively expensive for most people and wine was an exotic luxury consumed by the upper classes.

In 1950, an average adult was consuming 7.5 units a week.

By 1975, however, consumption had surged to more than 18 units per head as the popularity of imported lagers "exploded" in the late 1960s - as the first of the Baby Boomers turned 18 - and more women joined the workforce.

Pubs were places where men went to drink beer - mostly ale - after work (Image: PA)

John Holmes, a professor of alcohol policy and director of Sheffield University's Alcohol Research Group, said: "It's a rise in women's drinking and the breaking down of the taboos around women drinking.

"And also the beginnings of a more affluent society that was able to spend more money on leisure, and with that the greater affordability of alcohol."

The era also coincided with a change to retail licensing laws in 1962 which enabled supermarkets - a relatively new phenomenon in themselves - to sell wine, beer and spirits alongside other groceries.

In 1967, just 5% of off-trade alcohol sales took place in supermarkets; by 1972 it was 25%.

In 1976, pubs in Scotland - previously forced to close at 10pm and banned from opening on Sundays - were allowed to apply for an 11pm license for the first time.

In 1977, a village pub in Stirlingshire - the Cowie Tavern - made history as the first to open on a Sunday.

Sun, sea, sand - sangria: Foreign holidays, globalisation, and supermarkets drove an increase in demand for wine among UK consumers (Image: Getty)

Meanwhile, consumers' tastes were changing.

By 1972, package holidays were booming and Spain was the favourite destination for Brits jetting abroad.

"As people travelled more, they got a taste for wine, and a lot of that early travel was to the Mediterranean countries where wine is very ingrained," said Prof Holmes.

"But at the same time, wine was starting to make its way into British shops as a result of globalisation.

"The emergence of supermarkets had happened gradually, then accelerated, so there was this greater availability of decent quality wine and people also being able to travel abroad and bring back wine."

Public health campaigns began to focus more on the dangers of excessive drinking in the home (Image: UK Govt)

Wine went from making up around 4% of Britain's alcohol consumption in 1960 to nearly 20% by the mid-1970s.

The dramatic shift in the nation's drinking habits was already triggering alarm bells, however.

Deaths from liver cirrhosis in Britain doubled from 20 million in 1950 to more than 40 million by 1970, and in 1967 the first breathalyser was introduced to protect the public from intoxicated drivers.

By 1981, the television presenter and botanist David Bellamy was fronting a public health campaign encouraging people to drink moderately - "something like two or three pints two or three times a week".

It marked the beginning of a debate around "safe" drinking limits that would eventually lead, in 1987, to the first official guidelines on units - 21 for men and 14 for women - alongside a growing focus on the risks of home drinking.

From the mid-1980s, the share of alcohol consumed in pubs, bars and restaurants began to rapidly decrease as off-license sales grew, and Drinkwise publicity campaigns warned that home measures "tend to be on the generous side".

In 2014, off-trade beer sales in the UK overtook sales of beer in pubs, bars, and restaurants for the first time (Image: IAS)

1987-2006: Binge Drinking and 'Peak Booze'

Between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s, average alcohol consumption in Scotland surged by more than 25% and direct deaths increased from 384 in 1987 to 1,417 in 2006.

By 2005, adults in Scotland were consuming 22.5 units a week.

"Alcohol undoubtedly got very much cheaper in Scotland and the UK in the 1970s, 80s and 90s," said Dr Peter Rice, an addictions psychiatrist and former chair of Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP).

He added: "Stuff like ‘how long does an average person have to work to afford a bottle of whisky?’.

"That came down from weeks to days to hours, particularly when the supermarkets came onto the market.

"It’s about affordability as it relates to disposable income, but also the rate of change.

"If alcohol has been relatively expensive and then becomes relatively cheap, as it did in the UK, that’s bad news - and we saw the effects of that."

The share of alcohol sold off-trade, particularly from supermarkets, increased significantly from the mid-1980s (Image: Getty)

This was the era of binge drinking, alcopops, and ladettes, when getting drunk was framed as a form of cool rebellion. But there was also lingering despair.

Prof Holmes said: "One of the key drivers of the growth of alcohol consumption in the 1980s and 1990s was successive cohorts of young adults drinking more and more.

"It was about the binge drinking, the commercialisation of alcohol and pub sector pushing alcohol as a leisure product, and people consuming large quantities due to the marketing, the pricing and the greater availability.

"In parallel with that you have a rise in deaths which were happening primarily in middle-aged adults, largely stemming from the experience of de-industrialisation which hit parts of Scotland - particularly Glasgow - very hard.

"So you had a generation of men, and some women, who had a hard time of it economically in the 1980s who were at risk of alcohol problems, and because of the way the alcohol market was expanding generally they experienced particular harms with it."

Media depictions of intoxicated young people - particularly women - fostered an impression that problem drinking meant risky or antisocial behaviour, when the biggest issue in terms of public health were the chronic heavy drinkers behind closed doors.

Binge drinking hit the headlines in the 1990s, often portrayed as a problem of female drunkenness. But men were still drinking more, and the people dying from alcohol misuse were heavy drinking older adults mostly getting drunk at home (Image: Getty)

One famous image - a woman in a black party dress sprawled on a bench next to a bottle of Blue Wkd - was repeatedly used by editors around the world, but it was in fact posed by a model.

Dr Rice said: "That was completely the wrong image - the wrong age, gender, setting, wrong kind of drink.

"Girls drunk on the street on nights out - in terms of actual deaths, it's not a huge issue.

"It's still the chronic long-term drinkers who are responsible for most of the direct deaths, like liver disease, or indirect like cardiovascular and cancers.

"We really had to work hard on that, from 2006 onwards, to change perceptions."

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The 1990s 'ladette' culture was also product of clever marketing which had evolved from "lager lovelies" on Tennant's cans to alcohol as device of female emancipation.

Yet when it came to female drinking, sexism remained.

Professor Carol Emslie, who has led research at Glasgow Caledonian University into how gender and identity are used to market alcohol, said: "We used to have images of women sexualised to sell alcohol; now you've got images of empowered, sophisticated, fun-loving women enjoying alcohol - it's straight out of the tobacco industry playbook.

"But there's still a double standard around women's drinking.

"In the research we've done looking at how the media portrays binge drinking, it was very much portrayed as a female problem even though men were binge drinking more.

"The language used was all about women being 'out of control', unfeminine, under-dressed, and undignified, and they projected that idea through the pictures used.

"Even now, women are judged more harshly than men for drinking and drunkenness.

"There was some fascinating research from our colleagues in England and Wales who looked at court records and found that women were twice as likely as men to receive a harsher sentence for assault when they were intoxicated.

"We don't have the evidence for here, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't the same."

The real-terms affordability of alcohol grew substantially, particularly for off-trade sales, between 1987 and 2020, after adjusting for inflation and changes in disposable income (Image: Institute of Alcohol Studies)

2007-2024: Party's over? 

After decades of ever-increasing alcohol consumption, average intakes have declined 20% since the mid-Noughties.

In 2016, revised guidelines set the recommended limit at 14 units a week for both men and women.

Demand for no and low alcohol products is soaring, and 39% of adults aged 18 to 24 do not drink at all according to YouGov research.

Dr Emily Nicholls, a lecturer in sociology at the University of York who studies sobriety and abstinence, said there are signs that the decline in consumption may be "levelling off".

She said: "We might have seen the biggest bit of the drop, but there certainly continues to be a downward trend - not just in the UK, but in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of Europe.

"There's this re-conceptualising of alcohol among young people as a product of risk, rather than a product of fun and excitement or a rite of passage.

"It's no longer a source of pleasure - it's a source of anxiety and risk, both in terms of their physical safety and their mental health."

Gen Z are more likely than previous generations to consume little or no alcohol (Image: Getty)

Dr Nicholls said the growing appetite for "wellness" among younger generations, coupled with more online socialising such as gaming, are also factors, while the boom in "no and lows" has enabled many older adults to quit or cut back. 

Some argue that what is unfolding is the natural swing between "wet" and "dry" generations: that young people today are rejecting the boozy norms of their forebears just as the Baby Boomers once embraced alcohol as a liberation from post-war stuffiness. 

Others stress that the rise in consumption would never have occurred without alcohol becoming so much cheaper and more available.

Dr Rice said: "These swings do tend to happen, but it's a mistake to hope that’s going to happen by itself.

"These ‘cultural shifts’ go hand in hand with regulation."

Alcohol consumption in Scotland and England & Wales over time, by on-trade and off-trade sales (Image: Mesas/PHS)

So could consumption bounce back?

Dr Nicholls said: "It's possible we might see future generation drinking more in response, but when you look at some of the causal factors, my suspicion is that a lot of the things driving the decline at the moment won't go away - and might actually intensify.

"There's pressure to look after one's health and wellbeing as we see the decline in welfare systems and the NHS for example, and an increasing focus on mental health. I don't think that will go away.

"Another huge factor is the precarious and uncertain futures that young people have - the pressure they feel to be always 'on'.

"They can't really  afford to have a hangover because there's this idea in contemporary culture that to get ahead they've always got to be working on their CV, and that even the things they do in their leisure time need to be productive and constructive.

"Depressingly, I can't see that going away for future cohorts."