SerpApi.Org
The historic pub, the center of English social life, is having a renaissance.
Pubs are such a commonplace in British life—as diners are in rural America or corner bistros in Paris, say—that most British people fail to notice what a distinctive thing we have. The term is, of course, short for “public house,” and deep within the mythos of the pub is the idea of cozy domesticity. The pub is open to the community. It combines pubby things (dartboards, cask ales, urinals) with homely things (carpets, dogs, open fires, off-color jokes). If you’re in central London, you might even encounter the most cherishable pub sight of all: European tourists, sitting drinkless at a table, fuming at the fact that no one has come to take their order.
So the fact that the British pub is having a media moment in 2026 ought to be cheering—particularly to those of us who have long maintained that we should all spend more time in pubs. For after years of being snubbed in favor of cocktail bars, fancy coffee places, small plates restaurants, and other modern horrors, pubs have suddenly become quite hip.
It was arguably (everything is “arguably” with pubs) the Devonshire, which opened just off Piccadilly Circus at the tail end of 2023 and has been packed ever since, that prompted the reappraisal. Upstairs, you will find a truly excellent modern British-Irish restaurant serving elevated pub grub (potted shrimp, beef and suet pudding, lamb hotpot). Downstairs is a proper boozer complete with (arguably) the best pint of Guinness in London and Tayto’s crisps (i.e. potato chips) straight from Ireland. According to Neil Ridley, author of The Crisp Sommelier, a guide to matching crisps and alcohol, the optimal partner for Guinness is specifically smoky-bacon-flavored Tayto’s.
But I digress. (One should always digress in pubs.) In the wake of the Devonshire’s success—and an epochal uptick in Guinness drinking among Gen Z—many houses have flourished. “Pubfluencers” like Jimmy McIntosh (@londondeadpubs) and Niall Walsh (@proper_boozers) have earned large social media audiences for pub reviews that double as social history. Bohemian literary magazines like The Fence regularly publish guides to the best pubs; the French House on Dean Street in Soho is quintessential for any aspiring person of letters. But this is more than a hipster movement. The TV motoring presenter turned gentleman farmer Jeremy Clarkson—who occupies a position in the UK somewhere between Eeyore, overgrown schoolboy, and your reactionary uncle at Thanksgiving—devoted the most recent season of his reality TV show, Clarkson’s Farm, to his exploits buying and restoring a pub: the Farmer’s Dog in the Cotswolds, where he has committed to sourcing all produce within a 30-mile radius. Even before the show aired, excited punters were queuing up outside.
But as Clarkson made clear throughout that series, the British pub is in real trouble. Some 161 closed in the first three months of 2026, about two per day—and there is an elegiac air to all the pub appreciation, a sense that you don’t know what you got 'til it’s gone. The Daily Telegraph has turned saving the British pub into a national cri de coeur as well as, naturally, a stick with which to beat the former Prime Minister, Keir Starmer.
The most commonly cited reasons for the decline are rises in the minimum wage, alcohol duty, taxes on employers, and energy bills. But to this you can add changing lifestyle habits. People of all ages are simply drinking less than they used to. The working habits that long-sustained pubs are changing too. It is quite simply no longer normal to nip out at lunchtime for a quick pint—or to nurse a couple of pints over a weekday evening. And diminishing returns means higher prices. The once unthinkable £5 pint was breached without a whimper. In London, the prices are now nigh on Scandinavian.
So, pubs are political. Pubs are personal. But pretty much everyone can agree that we should probably spend more time in pubs. Pubfluencers like Walsh tend to romanticize a certain kind of lost working class ideal of a pub: horse racing on the TV, shrinkwrapped rolls on the counter, surly stares from the regulars. But really, there are pubs for every occasion. Winter pubs and summer pubs; city pubs and country pubs; football pubs and theatre pubs; Victorian gin palaces and Elizabethan taverns; gastropubs and micropubs and—this is a particular niche—rave pubs, like the Dolphin in Hackney, scene of bacchanal carnage across thousands of Saturday mornings. I particularly like a pub that is a portal to some distant age. I’ve fond memories of a truly chaotic coaching inn some friends and I pitched up in on a bachelor party in Cornwall many years ago; the place had boxing on the TV and luminous shots behind the bar but it somehow felt like we’d wandered into the looser, merrier England of the 18th century. “If you’re gonna throw up, do it on the floor, lads, I don’t mind!” enthused the landlord in a thick West Country accent.
 The cat named "The General" at The Seven Stars. Credit: Dukas/Getty Images |  The Corn Exchange in Bury St Edmunds. Credit: Wetherspoon |  A summer afternoon drink at The Coach & Horses pub. Credit: Mike Kemp/Getty Images |  The Woolpack Inn, a pub in Gloucestershire. Credit: Mike Kemp/Getty Images |
I’m tempted to say that the thing to look for in a pub is the distinct imprint of its owner. I can’t think of many places that do that better than the Seven Stars in Holborn, London, dating back to 1602. It is tucked behind the Royal Courts of Justice, has a clientele of barristers and judges, a cat called The General and a landlady named Roxy Beaujolais. My heart sang on arriving at the Flying Childers Inn in the tiny village of Stanton-in-Peak on a walking weekend in Derbyshire recently. The “snug bar” was packed with locals; there were Scampi Fries and Bass Ale at the bar; and a sign on the wall read: “FREE BEER TOMORROW.”
Then again, many of the best pubs are owned by larger breweries and some of these breweries are excellent: case in point, The Coach and Horses on Greek Street, owned by Fuller’s (which makes the matchless London Pride beer). It’s often only the larger breweries that can afford to keep these places going. The affordable chain JD Wetherspoons has its own special cult—and its pubs often occupy distinctly beautiful buildings that would otherwise have long since been demolished or turned into private houses. People make pilgrimages to the Art Deco Caley Picture House in Edinburgh and the Corn Exchange in Bury St Edmunds with its gorgeous glass roof. I think the crucial element is community. It should feel like people’s lives really happen in these places—out there in public.
What I would suggest is that you should make the time, wherever you are, to look up the place reckoned to be the “best” by people who know and order a local ale (or cider if you’re in the West Country). My recent favorite is the Woolpack Inn, just outside of Stroud in Gloucestershire. It’s in a tiny village called Slad, which is where the author Laurie Lee grew up and wrote Cider With Rosie, an elegy for the English rural way of life that was already dying 100 years ago. It has a seriously good gastropub in one half. But in the other half is a proper pub with Scotch eggs and local ales and picnic tables and enough room for children to run around. Every time I am lucky enough to drop by, I think: we really should spend more time in pubs.
Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
