This thesis represents the first urban case study of public houses at all levels of the victualling hierarchy (inns, taverns and alehouses) in an early modern English context. Moving beyond representational economies, and emphasising social practice, the study mobilises the administrative, judicial and fiscal records of the borough and port of Southampton to reconstruct a ‘landscape of drink’ in all its institutional variety: its geographical and physical dispositions; the agents who made livelihoods and joined company in it; a full range of social, economic and political functions; and its relationship to public order and urban stability. The study emphasises the local particularity of the topographical, socio-economic and jurisdictional frameworks that structured public drinking spaces and cultures, and, drawing on interdisciplinary impulses from cultural geography and architectural theory, pays particular attention to the constitutive role of the material and spatial properties of early modern public houses in determining the range and meaning of the activities which they enclosed. Far from being regarded as problematic or marginal spatial constituents of the early modern port, these distinctive urban locales emerge as central to the imaginative, economic and social worlds of early modern town-dwellers and visitors as well as to the governing strategies of the corporation itself.