London Is the Only UK Region Where Pub Numbers Are Growing

Spend any time reading about pubs and you’ll find a steady stream of closures. Locals turned into flats, beer gardens sold for housing, landlords handing back the keys. Across most of the UK, the official figures back that up.

London is different. Homefords analysed the latest ONS business counts for every UK region, and the capital is the only one where pub numbers grew between 2019 and 2026. It isn’t a huge rise, but against a national fall of 4.6%, it stands out.

Here’s what the numbers show, how London got here and what the data can and can’t tell us.

How many pubs are there in London?

London had 3,625 sites classed as pubs and bars in March 2026, up from 3,550 in 2019. That’s 75 more, a rise of 2.1%.

Every other region lost pubs over the same period, from a 0.9% fall in Yorkshire and The Humber to an 11% fall in Scotland. We cover the regions losing pubs fastest in our post on Scotland and Wales.

A recent turnaround

London’s growth hasn’t been steady. The count dipped to 3,535 in 2024, its lowest point in the period, then rose by 90 over the next two years.

Bars are scaled from 3,400 so the changes are easier to see.

Most of that rise came in a single year, with 85 more pubs in the 2025 count. The latest count added just 5 more, which is within ONS rounding. Two years is a short run, so it’s too early to call it a lasting recovery.

London lost pubs too, just more slowly

None of this means London escaped the long decline. It had 3,915 pubs in 2010, so it still has 290 fewer today, a fall of 7.4%. That’s the smallest long-run fall of any region, though. Wales lost 26.3% over the same period and the UK as a whole lost 16%.

Much of London’s heaviest loss came earlier. City Hall research found the capital lost more than a quarter of its pubs between 2001 and 2018, and that the number of small pubs fell by more than half, according to the Mayor of London. By 2018 the numbers had started to level off.

London compared with the rest of the UK

What might be helping London?

The ONS figures count sites. They don’t record why a pub opened or closed, so they can’t explain London’s growth on their own. A few things are worth knowing, though.

London has planning protections for pubs. The London Plan, the capital’s planning strategy, includes policies to protect pubs and beer gardens and the agent of change principle, which puts the cost of soundproofing on new developments built near existing venues, as CAMRA’s London Drinker explains.

The type of pub has changed too. An ONS study of the pub trade found it was mainly small, independent pubs that closed across the UK, while larger operators focused on bigger venues. By 2018, London’s pubs were split roughly evenly between large and small, according to the same London Drinker report.

Not every count agrees

Other sources measure pubs differently. British Beer and Pub Association figures recorded 17 London pub closures in the first three months of 2026, as reported by Rayo. That doesn’t contradict the ONS count. The BBPA tracks closures through the year, while ONS takes a March snapshot of every registered pub and bar, so openings and closures can balance out differently.

The ONS register also only includes businesses registered for VAT or PAYE, rounds counts to the nearest 5 and classes each site by its main activity. A venue that shifts between food-led and drink-led trade could move between the pub and restaurant categories.

London also leads on restaurants

Pubs aren’t the only part of London’s hospitality scene that’s growing. The capital has 9,560 licensed restaurants, around a quarter of the UK total, and it added 1,165 of them between 2019 and 2026. That’s almost a third of all UK restaurant growth. Our post on restaurant growth in every region has the full breakdown.

So London is the one place where both pubs and restaurants have grown since 2019. For the full picture, including interactive charts and a lookup for your own region, see our research on restaurants now outnumbering pubs in the UK.

Source: Office for National Statistics, UK Business Counts (local units by industry), via Nomis. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Figures are rounded to the nearest 5 by ONS. Media enquiries: hello@homefords.co.uk