Last orders?

1 · The mapCan you draw the UK with pubs?

Every place that serves food or drink has to register with the council for food hygiene inspections, and the Food Standards Agency publishes the whole register. I downloaded it, picked out everything registered as a pub, bar or nightclub, separated the social clubs, bowls clubs and Royal British Legions, and visualised the rest as dots. I didn't add any coastline, roads or towns.

The UK still shows up really well. You can see the cities glowing, the valleys of South Wales as little lines of lights, and the Pennines, Dartmoor and the Cambrian Mountains as dark gaps. The Scottish Highlands look almost empty, but that's partly because of how the pubs are registered there. More on that later.

2 · Before COVIDThe real last orders came in 2008

Then I wondered if COVID had an impact on the number of pubs. I looked at the ONS data, which counts pub and bar workplaces that employ staff, and found out that the big drop happened ten years earlier. In 2001 there were 52,500 pubs and bars in the UK. By 2019, before COVID, there were 39,130. That's a quarter of them gone, in the years of the smoking ban, the financial crash and cheap supermarket beer.

Between 2008 and 2013 the UK lost more than 9,000 pubs, about five a day for five years. From 2019 to 2024, with the lockdowns, the energy bills and the price of a pint, it lost 1,260. Grants and furlough probably helped many pubs stay registered, even when they were closed. Still, the COVID dip is small next to 2009.

When I split the pubs by size, I found something I didn't expect. Small pubs, with fewer than ten staff, fell from 38,830 to 21,645. The big ones actually went up, from 13,675 to 16,225. So it's mostly the little pub on the corner that we lost, while the big ones with the laminated menus and two-for-one burgers grew.

3 · 2001 to 2019Where the taps ran dry

The ONS data also goes down to council level, from 2001 to 2019. In that time 93% of UK councils lost pubs. London's outer boroughs lost the most. Barking and Dagenham went from 45 pubs to 15, so two out of every three closed. Newham, Luton, Croydon, Burnley and Hyndburn all lost about half.

Only a few places gained pubs, mostly places with lots of students, tourists or new bars: Hackney, Newcastle, Blackpool, York and Brighton. The Highlands also gained, which shows that the almost-empty dot map there is about how pubs are registered.

4 · Pub namesOne Red Lion, two Red Lions…

The fun part was going through the pub names. There are 17,434 different names in the register, but the same few keep coming up. The Red Lion is number one, about one pub in every hundred. Then come the Crown, the Royal Oak and the White Hart. The Royal Oak is named after the tree Charles II hid in after losing a battle, which is a very British thing to name a pub after.

There are more animals than royals in pub names. The Railway is sixth, because a lot of pubs were built next to stations for people getting off the train.

5 · Pub crawlsStreets that are basically a pub crawl

Next I looked for the streets with the most pubs and bars. I grouped the addresses by street and council, and left out streets where the pubs are spread over more than 1.5 km, because that's more of a hike than a pub crawl. The winner for me is Swansea's Wind Street, with 13 bars in 186 metres. That's one every 15 metres.

6 · The middle of nowhereHow far can you get from a pint?

I also wanted to find the place furthest from a pub. I put a 1 km grid over the land, measured the distance from every square to the nearest pub, and then checked the most remote spots again at 100 m. In England it's 15.7 km, in Kielder Forest in Northumberland, and the nearest pub is the Black Cock Inn in Falstone. In Wales it's 14 km, up in the Cambrian Mountains, and the nearest pub is the Trout Inn at Beulah.

About 5% of England is more than 5 km from a pub. In Wales it's 18%.

7 · Your turnHow pubby is your postcode?

Type in a UK postcode. I take the middle of its postcode sector (for example, all of SW1A 1), count the pubs and bars within 800 metres, which is about a ten-minute walk, and compare it with every other postcode in the UK.