Now you’re talking. The perfect pub, with a roaring fire, wisteria-fringed beer garden, barrels of Black Sheep and Scampi Fries, is as important a house-hunting criterion as price and location. But do you go for quantity or quality?
For number of pubs, it’s hard to find a definitive winner. My advice: stick to historic stagecoach stops or old market towns. Britain’s chief beermeister, Roger Protz, confirms the oft-repeated claim that St Albans (a triple-whammy market town, stagecoach stop and pilgrimage destination) has the highest number of pubs per square mile: 50. Dundee, Norwich and Otley are often mentioned, too. But in April, Liberty Games released research disagreeing with The Great Protz: the City of London came top with a whopping 219 pubs per Square Mile (in this case, literally). Those bankers, bless ’em, do need to unwind after a hard day making the rest of us miserable.
Pubs are an endangered species, though. The Campaign for Real Ale’s (Camra) Good Beer Guide says 30,000 have shut since the early 1970s, forcing survivors to up their game. Some, like Camra’s national pub of the year, the Cricketers Arms in St Helens, go for ingenuity (a whisky and gin bar). Others go upmarket: the Good Pub Guide’s pub of the year, the Kings Head in Bledington, Gloucestershire, serves roe deer carpaccio. And, fear not, Scampi Fries.
