There are pub people and there are spreadsheet people. It turns out my friend Kevin Stevens is gloriously both.
When he told me he and his wife had visited every single pub in his hometown across the year and scored them against a defined set of criteria, I was impressed.
When he showed me the analysis, correlations and variance tables, I was slightly in awe.
I love a good pub. I also know how wildly variable the experience can be. The same place can feel magical on a sunny Friday afternoon and utterly flat on a damp Tuesday night.
Who you are with matters. What you are there for matters. Some pubs are built for long, lingering catch-ups. Some are best for sport and noise. Some come into their own when the beer garden fills. Others are a refuge when the weather turns.
Kevin has managed to strip some of that subjectivity back and look at the bones of it. What actually correlates with a great pub experience? What separates the standouts from the also-rans?
I also can’t help but feel a bit sheepish. Visiting 38 pubs in a year as part of a structured project is dedication. I don’t think I managed more than a handful of local visits last year, which feels like a sorry state of affairs.
Over to Kevin.
What makes a great pub great?
The local; the boozer; a dive bar in a West End town.
We’ve got many names for the humble British pub.
They’re everywhere across the country from multi-floor city pubs, to tiny, hundred-year-old countryside retreats.
However, the news is dominated by stories of rising costs, rising prices and endless pub closures caused by falling trade.
Is GenZ to blame for drinking less than previous generations?
Except they’re actually not; we’re all just drinking less.
Either way, pubs are still an indelible part of British culture. For proof of this look no further than the Guardian’s recent series, ‘The Pub That Changed Me’.
With this in mind, I wanted to find out what makes a pub great. What are the elements of the pub experience that can elevate it to something special?
So, my wife and I decided the only way to find out was to visit all 38 pubs in my hometown and rate them.
Methodology
All 38 identified venues within a square mile of the town centre were visited across 2025.
After visiting, two of these were changed to bars rather than pubs and were excluded from the analysis therefore giving 36 pubs in total (let’s save the pub vs. bar debate for another day).
Each pub was rated on the following seven categories:
- Atmosphere – the overall feel of the pub
- Interior – the building and how it is decorated
- Seating – enough suitable and different seating
- Service – efficiency and friendliness
- Toilets – cleanliness and size
- Range of drinks – what’s behind the bar
- Outdoor space – the size and quality of outdoor space
Every pub received a score from 1 to 5 for each category, and a bonus point if it had outdoor space (at least one dedicated table – not just a bit of pavement). Therefore, the perfect pub would score 36 points, and the worst pub imaginable would score 6 points.
Pubs were scored individually of each other, rather than in comparison to, making it possible for all pubs to score the same.
The best and the worst
Table 1. Percentage scores of top five and bottom five scoring pubs overall rating
Above are the top and bottom five pubs from our data set. The top scoring pubs both achieved 80% – equating to 30/36 points. Initially I felt this was quite low for our top pubs, but on reflection it’s highly unlikely a pub would score maximum points across all the factors we’re measuring.
On the other end of the spectrum, the worst pub visited scored a lowly 17% (11 points), that’s just five points above the absolute minimum. It was as bad as you can imagine.
We’ll look at what elements go into making the best pubs in a moment.
The wisdom of (drunk) crowds?
“Why do this?!” I hear you cry; “I can just look on Google Maps to find the best pubs!!”. A bit presumptuous, but sure, Google Maps has become the go-to for many looking for the best places to eat and drink when visiting somewhere new.
So how do our ratings of 36 pubs compare to thousands of user reviews of the same places? Transforming our data to an equivalent 5-star score gives the following picture.
Figure 1. Pubs ranked by “My Rating” compared to Google Reviews
Well, that’s different, isn’t it?
While we do see a general decline in both scores, the Google reviews are high – very high! Not one pub scores below 4.0. That’s a strong score.
How many movie posters have you seen plastered with 4-star reviews? The median score is a whopping 4.3, compared to 3.0 in our ratings. Similarly, the standard deviation is very small in the Google data, 0.2 compared to 0.7. Overall scores in the Google data are high, and consistently so.
There’s obviously a problem with relying on just one person’s review of a pub, this highlights that relying on 1000s of reviews doesn’t make much sense either. There are a whole host of problems with trusting Google reviews as with any other online review platforms: positivity bias; reviewer bias; review management; and manipulation, to name a few.
Once most pubs are above 4 stars, ratings lose meaning as a comparison tool as differences are often driven by review count, rather than experience. Effectively 4 stars becomes the default, not the sign of a good pub.
I don’t know about you, but a town where every pub is 4-stars doesn’t feel particularly realistic. Maybe it’s time to ditch user reviews and start experiencing things for ourselves.
“You’ve never had a lager and gin & tonic and Baileys Irish cream chaser?!”
The below table shows the strongest correlating factors with a pub’s overall score, alongside the variance for each factor.
Table 2. Pub factors and their correlation with overall pub rating (r), variance (var) and result of r x var. Note: Outdoor space based on 35 scores.
The interior of a pub is the strongest correlator with a pub’s overall score, followed by atmosphere and seating. Toilets is the lowest correlator with overall rating, which surprised me. I thought a good pub would always have good toilets, but that’s clearly not the case!
Variance illustrates which category is the most differentiating for pubs. A factor with high variance would mean pubs are more likely to be scoring high or low, rather than in the middle. Outdoor space has the highest variance, but only moderate correlation. So while outdoor space can make a pub standout, it’s not an indicator it’s a good pub.
Multiplying correlation and variance together gives us the clearest indication that interior and atmosphere are the two most important factors when it comes to making and differentiating a great pub. That feels right, as those two factors are hard to alter or replicate.
Blueprint of a great pub
Visualising our top 5 pubs gives us an idea of why they’re so good.
Figure 2. Individual factor scores for the Top 5 scoring pubs by overall rating
The Top 5 all score well for atmosphere and interior, which we’ve just seen is most strongly correlated with a pub’s overall quality. As we also mentioned above, outdoor space ratings vary quite a lot from 5 to 1 star, and neither toilets nor seating go over a 4-star rating.
So, if any landlords are reading this, get some more interesting seating, improve the toilets and you could be on to a winner.
For completeness here’s the Bottom 5. Just in case you wanted to build the worst pub in the world.
Cheers!
Final Thoughts
I love that this project exists. It is nerdy in the best possible way and grounded in actual lived experience rather than hot takes.
It also reinforces something simple. Reviews are helpful, but they are not gospel. Atmosphere is difficult to quantify, yet it is often the thing we remember most. And sometimes the only way to know whether a pub is great is to walk in, order something decent and see how it feels.
If you enjoyed this, Kevin regularly shares thoughtful, data-led analysis over on LinkedIn. You can follow him here, and read other articles by him here.
What do you think makes a pub genuinely great? Is it the building, the people, the beer garden, the Guinness, the history, or something harder to pin down?
Let me know in the comments. I might even use it as an excuse to visit a few more locals this year.
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