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I claim a super-pedantic "unproven". For this to answer the real question it would have to work on a map from the 1920s. There used to be far more pubs in the
by sambeau 15y ago
I claim a super-pedantic "unproven".
For this to answer the real question it would have to work on a map from the 1920s.
There used to be far more pubs in the British Isles than there are now: in some cases 6x as many (for instance the Village of Cottenham where I used to live once had over 30, it now has 5).
Still - I like this very much.
- sorbus 15y agoLess pedantically, it does not seem like anyone has tried following the route to make sure that there aren't any pubs on it (the article even mentions that it initially passed two pubs, so it is plausible that there are others not included in the OpenStreetMap data).
- tlrobinson 15y agoit does not seem like anyone has tried following the route The anti-pub crawl?
- rmc 15y agoThere are people checking it today. I (and others) have checked it on Google street view.
- rmc 15y agoConfirmation has come in. The route is sound, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/davemolloy/status/81278042198114304 http://twitter.com/#!/davemolloy/status/81278042198114304
- qq66 15y agoWhy has the number of pubs gone down so much? Have pubs consolidated into fewer larger pubs or is the time spent in pubs down drastically because of other entertainment? I guess I still have a romanticized view of Ireland with uilleann pipers in every pub...
- RossM 15y agoFrom talking to two ex-publicans I know that: 1. Pubs are very expensive to run, and are difficult not to make a loss on. Rent goes up and up, and chain's prices go down. 2. The smoking ban in England caused a lot of pubs to be tipped over the edge and had to close down. 3. The price of alcohol being increased through taxes has had quite an effect. So in recent terms, I'd say these changes in society has led to a lot fewer pubs. However, I don't know much about the history of pubs in GB, so there was probably an earlier decline with alternative reasons - which I'd be interested in hearing.
- StrawberryFrog 15y agoAlso, Tesco and other supermarket chains sell six-packs and crates of lager for £ cheap at the low end, and have huge ranges of real ales and imported wines at the other end. People may drink less now, but they also drink differently.
- sambeau 15y agoWhile we may drink less the beer and wines we drink are twice as strong.
- rmc 15y agoSome of those would apply to Ireland, and some not. Ireland has some differences from the UK for pubs. 99.9999% of pubs are not chain pubs. A chain pub here, might have 3 pubs. All pubs are 'free houses' and can sell anything. (This means they sell all the same big brands. There's none of the Real Ale/CAMRA stuff which is a shame). Likewise there was a smoking ban a few years before UK. No new pub licences have been issued in about 100 years. So if a country pub closes down, the licence is usually sold on (for €€€€) to open another pub somewhere else.
- sambeau 15y agoPubs and legislation has changed. At the turn of the last century (1900s) people could open their front room as a small pub. So while a small village might have 30 pubs few of them were Inns - the large pubs that we are used to. Ireland kept the small room longer than England - they still exist in the west. While a front room with beer on sale may not be our modern idea of a 'pub' it would have figured in James Joyce's quote.
- bergie 15y agoThere is a project on OSM to also tag historical information. If this project was far enough, then you could take for example year 1920 and run the same algorithm. But with the current dataset, this is the reasonable "best effort"
- sambeau 15y agohttp://maps.google.com/maps?ll=52.286949,0.125136&spn=0.025,0.025&t=m&q=52.286949,0.125136 http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=52.286949,0.125136&spn=0.... Here's Cottenham. It's tiny. Try to fit 30 pubs evenly onto the map. Then try to cross it without passing one. Impossible. (plus a half of it is new builds - so a realistic density could be 50 pubs)