Nearest Pint, Pub Density Map – KnowWhere
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UPDATE 14th May 2026<br>Thanks to Harry Wood I discovered that 3,000 of the 45,000 pubs in the FHRS dataset had no coordinates and were not showing on my map. Particularly embarrassing was the omission of the Sutton Arms which is a Geomob after event favourite for geobeers. It was relatively simple to rectify this as all but 6 of the missing records had a postcode that could be used to geocode using postcodes.io. Then I had to rerun the count of pubs per constituency, update the pubs per 10k population and rerun the generalisation of the boundaries – easy enough but an hour wasted.<br>Learning: Even if your dataset is too large to thoroughly inspect, 5 minutes spent scrolling through it, running a couple of sorts and doing some kind of sanity check is time well spent.<br>There has been quite a bit in the news recently about 2 pubs per day closing according to the British Beer and Pub Association. That got me thinking about which areas of the country were best served and where were the dry zones? Nearest Pint, shows pub density per 10,000 population across every parliamentary constituency in Great Britain.<br>The first challenge was finding a reliable pub dataset. My initial instinct was to use OpenStreetMap, which I expected to have excellent coverage of pubs given the map parties that end up in a pub. I used Overpass Turbo to download (amenity=pub) and found around 19,000 pubs across the UK — a significant undercount. According to the BBPA, there were approximately 45,000 pubs in the UK in 2024, so OSM was capturing fewer than half of them.<br>The discrepancy makes sense when you think about it. OSM contributors apply a fairly personalised definition of what counts as a pub, whereas the official figure includes working men’s clubs, hotel bars, sports club bars, and other licensed premises that serve alcohol but might not fit the classic pub image. OSM mappers, quite reasonably, tend to tag only what is clearly and obviously a pub.<br>A much better source turned out to be the Food Standards Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Service (FHRS), which requires all food and drink premises to register — including pubs, bars and nightclubs. The GetTheData Open Pubs dataset, derived from FHRS, gave me just under 50,000 premises across England, Scotland and Wales, a figure much closer to industry estimates. Northern Ireland was excluded, it operates a separate food hygiene scheme, and the FHRS data doesn’t cover it.<br>With a fairly good pub locations dataset, the next step was assigning each pub to a parliamentary constituency and calculating density. I used QGIS to get a count of pubs per constituency and calculate the number of pubs per 10,000 people. The boundaries and population figures came from ONS. The one glitch was that the boundary files were very high resolution, I used MapShaper to aggressively thin the boundaries while retaining the topology – super neat tool, much better than trying to do in QGIS processing toolbox.<br>What the map shows<br>Traditional pub heartlands in northern England — particularly Yorkshire, County Durham and Lancashire — show the highest densities, with some rural constituencies reaching 15–20 pubs per 10,000 people. Coastal and rural constituencies in the South West also score highly, perhaps reflecting their tourist economies. Liverpool Riveride has the highest pub density at 23.73 pubs per 10,000 with a total of 277 pubs!<br>At the other end of the scale, outer London constituencies consistently show the lowest pub densities in England, despite the city having large numbers of pubs in absolute terms. Dense residential populations in areas like Barking (1.35), East Ham (0.76) and Slough (1.31) dilute the per-capita figures significantly. East Renfrewshire in Scotland ranks last among all 632 constituencies at just 0.73 pubs per 10,000 — only 7 pubs for a constituency of nearly 100,000 people.<br>Click any constituency to see its name, pub count, population, density and ranking. Zoom in to see individual pub locations. Use the rankings button to browse constituencies from highest to lowest density and click any row to fly the map to that constituency or use the locate me button to see pubs near you which is always useful.<br>Nearest Pint, Pub Density Map
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