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Britain Lost 14,000 Pubs, a Quarter, in 13 Years (substack.com) 100

Posted by msmash from the where-nobody-knows-your-name dept.
Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline.

Leek trained a random forest model on 49,840 pubs and found spatial isolation -- how far a pub stood from its nearest neighbour -- was the single strongest predictor of closure. Median nearest-neighbour distance for surviving pubs is roughly 280 metres; for closed pubs, 640 metres. Each closure pushes remaining pubs further into isolation, a dynamic Leek calls a "spatial death spiral."

Much of that isolation traces to ownership. Stonegate, Britain's largest pub company and a holding of PE firm TDR Capital, carries over $4 billion in debt from its 2019 leveraged acquisition of Ei Group. PE-backed and overseas-owned companies now control roughly a quarter to a third of all British pubs.
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Britain Lost 14,000 Pubs, a Quarter, in 13 Years

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  • No money, no friends (Score:5, Interesting)

    by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @03:47PM (#65994844)
    Gosh, maybe somebody should have thought about the poor public house before destroying the economy and telling the rest of the world to fuck off.

    It turns out if everyone hates each other and is poor, they don't hang out in bars much.

    Oh well. Maybe if they turn the island into an even poorer, meaner place, the good times will come back.

    • Are you sure about that? It seems like exactly the sort of time when people want to be drunk.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by klashn ( 1323433 )

        Best place to be drunk is at home, either with or without friends. Paying retail price for drinks is insane.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        If you want to get drunk, buy booze from the supermarket. It's cheaper, and being drunk in public can get you arrested.

        • Drinking with friends brings joy, drinking alone brings misery.

          Think about how you've felt when leaving a bar/pub with friends, and then think about how you felt when you had been drinking alone at home. Which did you feel better about the next day (no matter how physically bad you may have felt).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      It wouldn't be so bad, but there are hardly any lumberjacks in the UK.

      *runs away and hides from an irate mob of Monty Python fans

      Seriously, it very much depends on the area. Rugby, a town-borderline-city, has fewer pubs than the Marple/Mellor collection of villages up in t' norf. This is mostly because Rugby is a run-down dump with a dying town centre and hardly anything left in it, whereas Marple (although it lost its engineering back in the 60s) is a major commuter/retirement town with just enough rationa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        I always thought that Rugby was a game with an oval ball, and 15 players on each side.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by pjt33 ( 739471 )

          It is. And the sport is named after a public* school which is named after its town.

          * I.e. fee-paying. In England the term predates the existence of state schools by centuries, and denotes a school to which anyone with money could send their son, in distinction with private schools which might be one master teaching the children of one family.

          • Thank you for the explanation, I knew in UK English the meaning is swapped towards other languages, now I understand why. TIL the British wording is older.
  • You'd think that the pubs most likely to close would be the ones close to other pubs if demand is falling.

    Is this about population density?

    Oh... this may get some angry responses, but is it because Muslims don't drink? Obviously a large part of this is Covid, but the Brits are well known for their love of booze.

    • Re:Those distances sound backwards. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:52PM (#65995216)

      You'd think that the pubs most likely to close would be the ones close to other pubs if demand is falling.

      Is this about population density?

      Maybe because "pub-crawling" - visiting multiple establishments over the course of an evening - is (was?) a thing. Clusters have an additional appeal that isolated locations don't.

  • Correlation Does Not Equal Causation (Score:3)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @03:54PM (#65994866)

    found spatial isolation -- how far a pub stood from its nearest neighbour -- was the single strongest predictor of closure.

    I'd be curious to know the cause of all these closures. But, I'm quite confident that isolation from other pubs -- isolation from competition -- is not it.

    Whether it's a change in demographics, the byzantine regulations and requirements, economics... I don't know. But, it's not isolation.

  • $4 billion in debt
    Leverage buyouts are evil

  • Bad business model (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @03:58PM (#65994882) Homepage

    Identified several issues:
    1) Bad business models. Many pubs are owned by large companies. One company (Stonegate) owns about 1/11 pubs in the UK and they got that big by taking out massive debt to buy other pubs. But apparently, they (like many leveraged buyout firms) are good at purchasing pubs but are not good enough at running them to service the debt, so they are now selling dead pubs.

    2) Pubs in London thrived. Apparently if you can walk to lots of pubs and take the Tube (subway) home, you get lots of people drinking at all the pubs.

    3) Rural distant pubs. Outside of London, rural areas that have lots of pubs thrive, while those with isolated ones die out. This could merely be bad markets areas . I.e. do not open a pub where no one else has one, there is no market for them - but you can open one near the competition and everybody thrives. Or it could be some other factor such as pub crawl events keeping them open.

    I find the fact that isolated pubs fail to be very interesting. Is it a culture of not drinking at a pub? (outside of London) Is it that enough pubs create alcoholics, thereby keeping them all in business?

     

    • 2) Pubs in London thrived. Apparently if you can walk to lots of pubs and take the Tube (subway) home, you get lots of people drinking at all the pubs.

      I wouldn't call the smallest decline thriving, but alright.

    • Brits are famous drinkers, so I'm surprised on that angle alone. That pubs without any nearby competition are failing makes no sense. If you have a population that drinks enough to count as alcoholic in the US, and you find some that don't have a local pub, opening one should make great sense. If you find a town with no fast food, open a Taco Bell and you should do pretty well.

      But maybe it is that Private Equity does a really, really, bad job of running a pub. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a spec

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by SAU! ( 228983 )

        Enshitification wins again!

      • Re:Bad business model (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:16PM (#65995128) Homepage

        Generational divide.

        Younger generations don't drink alcohol like the older ones did. They consume other drugs, or no drugs.
        Younger generations don't go out as much as the older ones did. They stay at home and socialize via their phones.
        etc.

        • Re:Bad business model (Score:4, Insightful)

          by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @06:40PM (#65995300) Journal

          Well part of that is it's so fucking expensive to do that compared to how it used to be.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          Generational divide.

          Younger generations don't drink alcohol like the older ones did. They consume other drugs, or no drugs.
          Younger generations don't go out as much as the older ones did. They stay at home and socialize via their phones.
          etc.

          Can you blame them... they have the Boomers telling them not to spend money like they did when they were young so that they might be able to save up for a house deposit by the time they're 45 (to get a 35 year loan on an LTV of 10% for a property the boomers want to keep overpriced).

          Out of the other side of their mouths, the Boomers are also complaining that the pubs are shutting down.

          But beyond this, it's more the sky high rents that are causing this problem. But no one wants to challenge that (say..

          • We have the same phenomena in australia. Pubs are struggling. Back in the 1990s when I was in my 20s, everyone went to the pub. Its just what you did on a friday and saturday night. Get the boys together, hit the pub for 5pm happy hour, and drink till the publician calls last drinks. Then hit the clubs. Every pub had bands. And booze was cheap enough that even on a piddly 20yo wage you could afford to get utterly trolleyed 2 nights a week and still have enough money left over for rents/mortgage/bills/food/s

      • Re: Bad business model (Score:4, Informative)

        by Malc ( 1751 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @06:57PM (#65995342)

        Alcohol consumption per person has been declining in the UK over the last three decades. Meanwhile, itâ(TM)s been increasing in the US. Itâ(TM)s possible that Americans now drink more than Britons. Itâ(TM)s people over 50 that drink the most in the UK; younger generations arenâ(TM)t so interested.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )

      If you are not sure what pub to go to, you will go to an area with more pubs, so you can choose after arriving. So isolated pubs die out.

      I suspect this is true even in London. The pubs are on average closer together, but people walk to them rather than drive, and walk to tighter clusters of pubs.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      The problem is that if you're going for a day out in the country, then finding a little old pub is difficult. And the more difficult it is, the more likely you are to go somewhere else where you know there is one.

      And rural pubs are no longer "the local" where people drink every night. It's just far too expensive to do that. Not when five minutes down the road, there are cheaper options.

      And when you lose that social culture - when even the ramblers are not popping in for a half-way house, or tourists stop

    • I find the fact that isolated pubs fail to be very interesting.

      Isolation = monopoly = egregious behavior by the owner.

  • 14,000 pubs and one quarter ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:00PM (#65994890)
    Sounds like an old joke.

    "I lost 14,000 pubs ... and one quarter"

    "How did you lose the quarter ?"

    "See, I knew no-one cared about the pubs"

    I'll come in again.

  • Areas of London (Score:4, Interesting)

    by merde ( 464783 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:12PM (#65995116)

    A few months back I visited the part of London where I grew up. The 3 pubs nearest to my childhood home are all dead.

    Where I live now there have been no pub closures for as long as I have lived there, about 8 years.

    Some areas of London kill pubs, others keep them alive. Without serious study it is not easy to say why the difference.

    • I grew up in a village with four pubs for about 3000 people. My parents have moved, so I haven't been back for about 15 years, but it was down to one pub then. I think a big factor was the bypass, which also killed off the local antique shops. Back in the day people driving through the village might stop to browse the shops and have lunch: now they barely realise it's there.

  • Corporate Holding Companies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gilmoure ( 18428 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @06:01PM (#65995234) Journal

    They buy up a type of business and then it become's middle management's job to justify their section or local by meeting or failing quarterly numbers. Upper management then demonstrates their employability by cutting locations and 'improving the bottom line'.

    The same thing has been happening in the US, with chains of restaurants and retail stores going under.

    Fuck the corporations.

  • If there's more pubs around, you don't have to walk as far to survey the talent if the pub you go to lacks pretty women. If there's just one pub on its own, it's more of a crap shoot. And so they get less patrons. People want to shag.

  • PE want their pubs to go bust! (Score:3)

    by sometimesblue ( 6685784 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @07:15AM (#65996054)
    Pubs closing is all part of the plan. Pubs make a piddling profit because so much goes on bills and tax. So the private equity owners apply to the local council to shut the pub and turn it into a residential property, which would make far more profit. The council says no and insist it stays as a pub. So the PE run it into the ground, let the building rot for a couple of years with a 'Tenant wanted' sign outside, then approach the council again saying that its clearly unviable as a commercial property. The council will now agree to allow a change-in-use application to smarten the area up a bit. So the PE makes 10X the profit this year than it would otherwise. Why would they take this one-off payment instead of being in for the long term? So they can buy up more failing pubs and start the process again.
  • I didn't see anyone give the true reasons, talking about population this and that. I spoke with a pub owner - they said it literally cost more to keep the lights on than they were making in profit.

    It's not demographics or 'young people drinking less' - I've heard that every generation. It's purely cost driven - high energy, high rates (property tax), increases in national insurance (employers tax) and wages, to a lesser extent increases in duty vs buying at a supermarket...all leads to high drink cost at

  • Naturally, to do the pub study it had to take a Leek.

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