Nearest Pint, Pub Density Map

There has been quite a bit in the news recently about 2 pubs per day closing according to the British Beer and Pub Association. That got me thinking about which areas of the country were best served and where were the dry zones? Nearest Pint, shows pub density per 10,000 population across every parliamentary constituency in Great Britain. The first challenge was finding a reliable pub dataset. My initial instinct was to use OpenStreetMap, which I expected to have excellent coverage of pubs given the map parties that end up in a pub. I used Overpass Turbo to download (amenity=pub) and found around 19,000 pubs across the UK — a significant undercount. According to the BBPA, there were approximately 45,000 pubs in the UK in 2024, so OSM was capturing fewer than half of them. The discrepancy makes sense when you think about it. OSM contributors apply a fairly personalised definition of what counts as a pub, whereas the official figure includes working men’s clubs, hotel bars, sports club…