Ye Olde Mad-Lib Pub Crawl Generator
If you’re looking to knock back a pint in the UK, there’s a good chance you’ll wander into a watering hole named the Red Lion — the the UK’s most popular pub name. And if you were looking to take in a pint at each Red Lion, well good luck, there are 339 and that’s one hell of a pub crawl.
But here at The Pudding, we’re up for the challenge. (Note: if you really want to test fate, try this crawl of every single pub in the UK.)
We gathered pub names from Pubs Galore, the largest crowdsourced list of pubs in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and plotted the shortest route between pubs of the same name. That means 339 pints at Red Lions, or 258 pints at Royal Oaks, or 176 pints at Crown Inns — the three most common pub names. And, these names follow pretty familiar naming patterns: color+noun, royalty+noun, or noun+inn. (We’ll also look at another common pattern noun&noun.)
Of course some pubs stray from these patterns (we’re looking at you The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn), so let’s just limit it to the more common ones for our madlib pub crawl:
color
+
noun
( unique pub names)
Red Lion
Name
No.
royalty
+
noun
( unique pub names)
Royal Oak
Name
No.
noun
+
inn
( unique pub names)
Crown Inn
Name
No.
noun
&
noun
( unique pub names)
Fox & Hounds
Name
No.
Pub name lore can be traced back to the first century AD when the Roman Empire stretched to Great Britain. Tabernae, the precursors to taverns, would hang vine leaves outside inns where wine was sold. But during the Roman invasion, hard-to-find vine leaves were swapped for bushes, giving rise to names like The Bush Inn or The Bull & Bush.
This tradition of naming pubs after what hung above their doors continued into the Middle Ages where watering holes would display distinct objects like ploughs (The Plough Inn) or wheatsheafs (The Wheatsheaf) to attract patrons — many of whom were illiterate and needed the pictorial cues.
In 1393 an act was passed that required pubs and inns to have signs identifying themselves as official watering holes and many began to adopt names to honor the monarchy: The White Hart (the badge of King Richard II), The Red Lion (King James I’s red lion of Scotland), and The Royal Oak (a symbol of then Prince Charles’ defiance during the English Civil War).
Now that you’ve got the backstory, let’s drink to that. Select a naming pattern below, then filter by name to generate a map and itinerary for your pub crawl.
Pick a pattern
There are 339 pubs named Red Lion on your pub crawl. Your crawl is miles/ kilometers long. There goes your liver!
Your itinerary
No.
Name
Address
Data & Methods
Over 41,000 currently open pubs were collected from Pubs Galore, where members maintain the largest list of pubs in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). We focused on four common naming patterns and filtered the pubs into “color + noun”, “royalty + noun”, “noun + inn/hotel” and “noun & noun” groups. Then, we counted up pubs with the same name (i.e. there are 352 pubs named “Red Lion” and 258 pubs named “Royal Oak”), giving us over 200 unique names within our patterns. As we were doing the grouping, we removed filler words, such as “the,” “old,” “lower,” “"of hermitage,” "ye olde,” and any mention of “Wetherspoons” (even though we love a good Wetherspoons, let’s be real). We removed names where there were fewer than 10 pubs, because you need at least 10 for a proper pub crawl.
To calculate the shortest pub crawl between pubs with the same name, we used Mapbox’s Optimization API, which returns a “duration-optimized route between the input coordinates.” The API works to solve the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP), or the question: “Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city and returns to the origin city?” The Optimization API returned the pub stop coordinates in the order in which we needed to visit them for the shortest route. We then used Mapbox’s Direction API to plot that route between pubs. Finally, we used Mapbox GL JS to display the routes on the above map. The vintage style was designed by Amy Lee Walton, a Principal Designer at Mapbox. Pubs named “Navigation Inn” and “Royal Exchange” were omitted from the map because of routing errors.
We’d like to give special thanks to Lo Bénichou and Buro Mookerji at Mapbox for helping us along this crazy journey. This project would not have been possible without their help. Mapbox FTW!
All the drawings used in this piece have been released into the public domain by the British Library on flickr.