Challenger Cities

In this episode of Challenger Cities, we've got Pete Brown, one of the UK’s most thoughtful writers on beer, pubs, and drinking culture.
Pete has spent decades writing about pubs not as lifestyle accessories or nostalgic backdrops, but as places where history, behaviour, economics and everyday social life collide.
We talk about why pubs weren’t designed, branded or planned into existence, but evolved slowly through circumstance, need, and habit. Why that matters for cities obsessed with masterplans and placemaking. And why attempts to “recreate” pub culture so often feel hollow.
Pete offers a compelling reframing of alcohol as a form of social technology. Dangerous if mishandled, but deeply valuable when surrounded by the right rituals, spaces, and social rules. We explore how pubs moderate behaviour, teach people how to drink, and create a crucial middle ground between sobriety and excess that many cultures understand instinctively.
We also get into the overlooked design intelligence of pubs. The bar as a place for accidental conversation. The invisible queue. The unspoken rules about who you talk to, where, and for how long. How pubs create weak ties between people who would never otherwise meet, without forcing intimacy or participation.
From there, the conversation widens out to loneliness, screens, and a world increasingly engineered to keep people at home. Pete makes the case that pubs sit in direct opposition to frictionless, algorithmic life, and that this discomfort is precisely what makes them socially valuable.
We talk about flat-roof pubs, post-war housing estates, and why the loss of informal gathering places has left many newer neighbourhoods socially hollow. We look at how pubs are being squeezed from all sides: cheaper beer in supermarkets, rising costs, higher taxes, and policy frameworks that treat them like any other retail unit while ignoring the social work they do for free.
This is a conversation about pubs, but it’s really a conversation about cities. About what we value, what we price, and what we quietly allow to disappear while wondering why public life feels thinner than it used to.

Most cities are designed around a surprisingly narrow idea of who gets to feel comfortable in public.
In this episode of Challenger Cities, Iain Montgomery chats with Patti Baston, who runs a feminisation makeover service in Manchester. On the surface, her work might sound niche. In practice, it turns out to be a sharp and unexpected lens on how cities really work, who they quietly exclude, and how play, permission, and experimentation get designed out of adult life.
We talk about growing up without space to express yourself, getting ready in café toilets, the freedom cities can offer through anonymity and density, and why permission might be one of the most overlooked forms of urban infrastructure. Along the way, the conversation touches on femininity, masculinity, power, vulnerability, internet culture, gentrification, and what happens when cities mistake control for care.
This isn’t a culture-war conversation. It’s a human one. About joy, play, and what it means to feel at ease in public.
Expect some swearing.

Iain Montgomery talks with Glenn Auerbach about why sauna, bathing and cold-water culture has suddenly gone mainstream in cities around the world, and why the reasons go far beyond health trends or wellness hype.
From floating saunas and mobile heat rooms to dawn swims in urban rivers and harbours, we explore how shared rituals of heat, cold and recovery are reintroducing forms of social connection that cities have quietly lost.
Glenn traces sauna’s roots as everyday civic infrastructure rather than luxury amenity, reflects on the risks of gatekeeping and elitism as the scene grows, and explains why inclusive, well-held sauna culture can strengthen community, public trust and even environmental stewardship.
The conversation reframes sauna not as a fad, but as a clue to how cities might better balance pressure, release, togetherness and solitude.

We reconnect with Jasmine Palardy almost eighteen months after our very first conversation to reflect on what has changed in how we think and talk about cities, and what hasn’t.
Exploring why real progress in cities comes not from imposing control but from embracing uncertainty, loosening the grip of over-planning and letting “accidental urbanists” and informal city builders shape change on the ground.
Jasmine reframes urbanism as a messy, lived practice rather than a rigid discipline, and highlights how everyday friction and irritation are often the beginning of meaningful change.
This episode reframes control, imagination and experimentation in the design of cities.

Ruchita Bansal discusses what happens when modern infrastructure projects are built at speed but don’t connect with the deep, informal systems that make cities work.
Drawing on her experience across Indian urban planning and large-scale delivery, we explore how cities in India are being transformed rapidly with metros, highways and ambitious timelines, yet often miss the connective tissue of everyday life such as first-mile/last-mile walking, informal transport, street life and safety.
We dig into whether building faster actually deepens resilience or erodes memory, how imported models can misfit local context, and what it means to design infrastructure that truly serves people rather than object-centric headlines.