Every Pub in Brighton Project
Earlier this year, I bought my first house.
As I am not Mega Rich and cannot afford to buy a house in the capital, it meant leaving London for pastures new and purchasing a house in one of the still-bonkers-expensive-but-we-can-afford-a-house-there cities in Brighton.
No sooner had our offer been accepted, I began a cursory check of the pub scene in Brighton - I’d obviously visited the city several times when viewing houses and had frequented several pubs there over previous trips but, with my soon-to-be local glasses on, decided it was time to do some proper research. Proper Research at Beer Voyage means - make a Google Map of good beer places in an area. Honestly, we’ve got loads.
In doing said research, I stumbled across a web page from Liberty Games (makers of all your favourite pub game tables, machines and related paraphernalia) containing some analysis they did into which city has the most pubs per square mile.
Brighton was joint top with Liverpool in having 11 pubs per square mile (Liverpool being a bigger city so having more pubs in total but shh).
Very handily, the website included a link to a Google Spreadsheet that listed all of the pubs and I think you can see where this is headed, if the title of this post didn’t already.
Every Pub in Brighton Project
I want to try and visit every pub in Brighton. Maybe I’ll do a quick review of each one along the way. I’m not sure the format of these yet - perhaps I’ll do them in batches of 5 or 10 per post as I don’t have the mental capacity to give every single pub an in-depth review.
For the sake of fairness, I am documenting my visit to each pub from July 2022 onwards as I think it’s unfair to review a pub I may have gone to in 2016 as it will obviously have changed since then. As have I, for better or worse.
That leads us to setting the definition of both what exactly counts as a pub and what exactly counts as Brighton.
1 // What counts as a pub?
Firstly, what is a pub? You might think this is the sort of question you end up asking several pints deep at your local but I need to define what a pub is for this project.
CAMRA’s definition of a pub is covered by these 4 points (with a few caveats):
“1. is open to the public without membership or residency
2. serves draught beer or cider without requiring food be consumed
3. has at least one indoor area not laid out for meals
4. allows drinks to be bought at a bar (i.e., not only table service)”
— CAMRA's Definition of a Pub
Which I think I’m going to use here. I would like to add 'predominantly’ to the start of point 2 so I don’t have to visit all of the cocktail bars Brighton has to offer (there are loads) that only serve old gassy lagers on draught - this is a beer blog after all but we will probably play a bit fast and loose with this. Basically, it’s entirely at my discretion. Great caveat.
2 // What counts as Brighton?
Helpfully, the data pretty much solves this one - we are essentially going to use everywhere in the data with a location of ‘Brighton & Hove’. This covers basically all of the city of Brighton & Hove but not the unitary authority itself. With a few extra additions thrown in as I see fit that might breach the city boundaries (I want to check out some pubs outside of these parameters so this is an excuse to include them). Again, great caveat.
Pub list
Liberty Games collated their information from GetTheData - a website that organises UK open data into location-based dashboards, surfaces the data available, and signposts the source. So we can discover this data is derived from the Food Standard Agency's Food Hygiene Ratings and the ONS Postcode Directory. Thanks GetTheData!
So, I grabbed an updated copy of the data from GetTheData and removed everything not related to Brighton & Hove. The data taken is from February 2022 so chances are some of these places may have closed between now and then. There’s also every chance a pub may have opened between now and then so I’ll do my best to add them in as and when that happens.
I then set about applying the above criteria to the list to tidy it up - some places were listed more than once (due to the restaurant and bar being separate entities), several membership clubs, a few casinos, a few strip clubs and a whole heap of cocktail bars were omitted. I then checked online to see if each pub was still in business and open.
You can view the Google Spreadsheet of the data below - there is a tab of the raw data, a tab with my justifications on if a venue is a pub or not and then the definitive Pub List.
Every Pub in Brighton Project data
Every Pub in Brighton Project Map
Finally, I mapped all of the pubs from the data to a Google Map (told you this was coming), which you can view below. When doing this, I noticed several pubs missing from the data list so added them in manually. Giving us a total of:
220 pubs to visit
(This may increase/decrease as time passes if I deem a venue to not be a ‘pub’ in the definition we are using here or if a new venue opens up that isn’t accounted for.)
As I visit each one the icon will turn from red to green and I’ll add a number to the description so I can keep a track of the order. I might even add a link to the mini-review of each one eventually. The map will be the most up-to-date/accurate as I probably won’t check the data list from this point onwards.
View on Google Maps
Have I missed a pub? If so, get in touch and let me know.
