London’s pubs, counted: what they are called, how near they are, how many are left

Every light is a pub

The map is drawn from pubs and little else: each of the 3,155 places that the volunteers of OpenStreetMap have mapped as a pub inside London’s 33 boroughs is one light. Under the lights are London’s parks, main roads, railways and the Thames.

Pick any spot on the map and it counts the pubs within 800 m.

From one Soho postcode, 140 pubs within 800 m

The lights run together in the West End and the City. No postcode has more pubs around it than W1D 5JJ, in Soho: 140 within 800 m in a straight line (a neighbour, WC2H 9NP, has as many). For half of London’s postcodes the figure is 4 or fewer.

How complete is the map? On the Food Standards Agency’s hygiene register, 814 London premises have map coordinates and a pub-like name (an Arms, a Head, a Tavern, a Red Lion). For 737 of them, 90%, the map has a pub of the same or nearly the same name within 250 m, and more than half of the rest have another mapped pub that close. Mappers often work from the same register (about six in ten of the mapped pubs carry its reference number), so this is a check, not an independent count. The map can also lag the other way: a pub may have closed since a mapper last passed.

The commonest name is The Crown

31 pubs on the map are called The Crown, counting The Old Crown and The Crown Tavern with them. That is first place on the map under each of three counting rules: the name as written; without “The”; and the widest, which also sets aside “Ye”, “Old” or “Olde” at the front and a closing Inn, Tavern, Hotel or Pub. Without “The” only, the lead over the Prince of Wales is a single pub, 26 to 25. On the Food Standards Agency’s register the two change places with the rule.

Second place depends on the counting rule. Under the widest one the Prince of Wales has 25, the Red Lion 23, the Railway (mostly Railway Tavern) 22 and the Ship 20. A Rose and Crown or a Crown and Anchor is a name of its own.

Most names are not shared at all: under the widest rule, of 2,085 different names, 1,759 belong to one pub only.

Most Railway pubs are by a station

36 pubs have Railway, Station or Engine in their name. (Locomotive was on the list and matched none; the match is by word, so a Fire Station is in.) 30 of them are within 300 m of a railway or Underground station, and half are within 157 m. For London’s pubs as a whole, half are within 368 m.

The lists of words were fixed before any distance was measured, and each of the three differences in this part is larger than chance explains: a random draw of as many pubs matches it less than once in a thousand tries.

Ships and Anchors lean to the river

64 pubs have Ship, Anchor, Waterman, Barge, Boat, Ferry, Pilot, Steam Packet or Trafalgar in their name (Mermaid was on the list and matched none). Half of them are within 598 m of the Thames or of the stretches of its tributaries, such as the lower Lea, that the map draws with it. Half of all London pubs are more than 2.1 km from that water.

Ploughs and Wheatsheaves lean to outer London

70 pubs carry a farm or hunting name: Plough, Wheatsheaf, Harrow, Woodman, Bull, Barley Mow, Fox and Hounds, Hare and Hounds, Jolly Farmers (a Bull and Bush counts; a Bull’s Head does not; Haycutter was on the list and matched none). Half of them are more than 12.4 km from Charing Cross. Half of all pubs are within 7.1 km of it.

The map shows where the names are, not why. No source used here dates these pubs or says what stood around them when they were named.

About one pub in eight is royal

376 pubs, 12% of those on the map, have Crown, King, Queen, Prince, Princess, Duke, Duchess, Victoria, Albert or Royal in their name (King’s and Queens count). They turn up in every borough.

Half of London’s postcodes are within 286 m of a pub

The distance is a straight line from each of London’s 177,041 postcodes to the nearest mapped pub, counting pubs just outside the boundary too. 45% of postcodes are within 250 m, and 89% within 800 m.

800 m would be about ten minutes on foot if streets ran straight. They do not, so the walk is longer. And a postcode is a handful of addresses, not a person: this is a count of places, not of Londoners.

Where the nearest pub is more than 800 m away

19,774 postcodes, 11% of London’s, are further than 800 m from any mapped pub. They are the dots now lit: 93% of them are in the 20 outer boroughs, which hold 58% of all London’s postcodes.

The furthest is RM14 3RD in Havering, 2.9 km from the nearest pub.

Three of the 217 districts have no pub on the map

IG3, IG4 and IG7 have none; of IG7, which crosses the boundary, only the London part is counted. HA8, IG2, IG5, NW11, SE28, SM2 and SW20 have one each. At the other end, W1 has 140 and SE1 112. Districts with fewer than 100 London postcodes are not in this count.

A zero on the map is not proof that there is none. The food hygiene register lists ten premises in those three districts as a pub, bar, nightclub or club. Each district’s own result gives both figures.

The map gives no reason for any district’s count, and neither does this page.

4,835 pubs and bars in 2001, 3,525 in 2024

This is a different count from the map’s. The Office for National Statistics counts, each March, the workplaces with at least one employee on its register whose main activity is “public houses and bars”, and rounds each figure to the nearest five. Bars are in it. A pub that registers its main trade as a restaurant is not; the business itself chooses the heading.

It measures the net change, not closures: one pub closing and another opening leave the number where it was. London’s count fell by 27% between 2001 and 2024; England’s fell by 26%.

Nearly all of London’s fall came before 2017. Since then the count has stayed between 3,525 and 3,575.

The statisticians themselves advise caution on two points: figures before 2009 were converted from an older classification of industries, and since 2015 the register has taken in businesses known only from payroll records, which it used to leave out.

31 boroughs have fewer; Hackney has more

Newham went from 105 to 45, Barking and Dagenham from 45 to 20, Croydon from 165 to 80. Those are the largest falls in proportion, about half or more in each; the rounding leaves the order among them open. Westminster still has the most by far: 445, down from 515.

Hackney had 155 in 2001 and 205 in 2024, the only borough with a clear rise. Bexley’s 95 and 90 are within the rounding.

The colours show each borough’s count in the chosen year against its own count in 2001. Drag the year, or let it run.

The small pub halved; the jobs grew

Pubs and bars with fewer than ten employees: 3,390 in 2001, 1,675 in 2024. With ten or more: 1,450, then 1,850. In 2001 fewer than a third of London’s pubs had ten or more staff; in 2024 more than half did.

So there are fewer pubs and more people working in them: about 42,000 people employed in 2001 and 52,000 in 2024 (the statisticians round these figures).