Where are all the pubs?
Monday 1 February 2010 | By Samantha DavieI looked to past blogs for inspiration this week. I noticed that my most read blog was the blog about Whisky. What was it about the Whisky blog (http://www.gavurin.com/00,blog,11018,435,00.htm ) that people found interesting?
I thought it might be something to do with the alcohol, so I continued with a booze themed blog.
I remember that people used to quote a statistic about the place I live- Alnwick, Northumberland - ‘Alnwick has more pubs per person than anywhere in Great Britain’. Now I have access to G-View I can easily investigate…
I looked at Annual Business Inquiry data to have a look at pubs, technical speaking they are called bars as stated by Standard Industrial Classification code 5540-for those of you how want to know.
I started looking at location quotient data. Location quotients identify industrial strengths in places. So which places have high location quotients when looking at employment in pubs?
If a place has a LQ of 1 then they have the same proportion of their employment in pubs as Great Britain. A LQ of 1.68 means that there are proportionately 68% more people working in this industry in that place than Great Britain generally.
The place in Great Britain with the highest LQ for pubs is the Isles of Scilly with an LQ of 3.7. There are proportionately 370% more people working in this industry than Great Britain generally. 7% of the workforce on the Isles of Scilly work in pubs.
Scotland appears to have low LQs for pubs (high LQs are highlighted in yellow). The South West appears to have proportionately more people working in pubs than Great Britain generally.
As location quotients aren’t meaningful to everyone, I looked at the analysis differently - Pubs per head of population. Which gave me the following result:
| Place | Pubs per 1,000 residents |
| Isles of Scilly | 5.16 |
| Derbyshire Dales | 2.42 |
| Westminster | 2.37 |
| Pembrokeshire | 2.24 |
| Eden | 2.16 |
| Alnwick | 2.04 |
| Bridgnorth | 2.01 |
| Powys | 1.98 |
| Penwith | 1.98 |
You may wonder why the city of London has such a high rate? The city of London has around 200 pubs and 8,000 residents. The 200 pubs will be serving the 300,000 people who commute into the city to work.
Looking back to my earlier statement ‘Alnwick has more pubs per person than anywhere in Great Britain’. Well the rumor wasn’t exactly correct, but Alwick is in the top 10.
If you look at the top 10 they are generally places where tourists visit, which is not really surprising as pubs generally appear in places tourists visit.
This quick analysis was carried out by using G-View from Gavurin. For more information about G-View Technology, or anything in this blog please contact Samantha.davie@gavurin.com or call 0191 2684636.
To see Recession Map - a showcase for G-View technology. Recession Map functionality and data has been deliberately limited, click here- http://recessionmap.co.uk. Gavurin website- www.gavurin.com
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