Alcohol is at once a social problem, a leisure activity, a pleasure, an accelerator of violence, and central to identity formation (Jayne et al. (2008) PHG 32, 2). In geographical studies of alcohol, drunkenness features heavily. It’s good, therefore, to read that Eldridge and Roberts (2008) Area 40, 3 challenge the urban savage/social drinker binary, ‘which wrongly presumes consumers cannot be both’. In Europe, a broad division was made between a northern dry area, where beer is the leading beverage, consumed at weekends and outside mealtimes; and a southern wet area, where wine is the main beverage, usually drunk at meals. Subsequently, European alcohol choices have started to converge (Allamani et al. (2000) Substance Abuse 21, 4).

P. Chatterton and R. Hollands (2003) see alcohol-related establishments as the driving force in recent city-centre regeneration; Roberts (2006) Cities 23 reports that cities at night now attract vast numbers of people. See also D. Hobbs et al. (2003). However, Roberts et al. (2006) Urb. Studs 43, 7 conclude that British free market attitudes to extended licensing hours will undermine the government’s professed aspirations for an ‘urban renaissance’ of cultural inclusion and animation. Smith (2003) Tijdschrift 94, 4 makes the expected link between alcohol and deprivation in the city—where alcohol use is more visible. Working-class cities are deemed to be places for excessive partying and wild stag or hen nights (Chatterton and Hollands (2001) U. Newcastle on Tyne), and a drinking culture remains firmly tied to the North-East industrial heritage (Nayak (2003) Env. & Plan. D 21, 1). Shaw, (2000) Australian Geogr. Studs 38, 3 observes that when aboriginality was conflated with alcoholism, it tended to be exoticized and romanticized in its traditional ‘bush’ setting, but demonized in its urban setting. Kokorev (1997, cited in Round (2006) Geografiska B 88, 1) finds that Magadan Oblast, in Russia’s far north-east, has the country’s highest alcohol consumption rates; Magadan is the location of a notorious gulag. Henry (2006) Paper IGU Conf. argues that differences between a city Central Business District in Hobart, Tasmania, where alcohol is banned, and the Wine and Food Festival, where it is not, result from the ‘different ontological claims made about their spaces’.

S. Winlow and S. Hall (2006) discuss alcohol’s central connection to interpersonal violence and disorder; see also Silverman and Della-Giustina (2001) Urban Studies 38. Tatlow et al. (2000) J. Community Health 25 demonstrate a clear link between the density of shops selling alcohol and alcohol-related hospital admissions in San Diego county. Alavaikko and Osterberg (2000) Addiction, 95 (suppl. 4) consider the way the increasingly globalized alcohol supply and international supply-side initiatives impact on strategies to reduce alcohol-related harm, and how international trade treaties affect alcohol regulation and policy.