Talk:List of pubs in London

Structure

London is a collection of villages - the city of London is just the square mile. Structuring the list by borough or district may be problematic because of overlaps and fuzzy boundaries. For example, the West End consists of multiple districts such as Soho and Covent Garden with debatable boundaries and multiple boroughs, including Camden and Westminster. To cope with this and minimise argument, perhaps we should make this a sortable list with columns including:

• name (and previous names)
• borough
• district
• year of foundation
• listing status (grade I, II, &c.)
• brewery or chain
• type - gin palace, riverside, coaching inn, &c.

Andrew D. (talk) 07:25, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Great suggestions, and I support this. It would definitely take some time and work to accomplish, though. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:30, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Excellent idea from Andrew - hope someone can find the time to implement it! In the meantime, I can't see any reasonable basis to accord Soho some special status. As Andrew points out, it is impossible to demarcate such districts. Boroughs do have defined boroughs, but splitting up the list by borough has pros and cons, and I can't see how it would be worth the effort to do only that. Edwardx (talk) 12:14, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

A template too

The contents of this article seem to be duplicated in Template:Pubs in London. Do we need this duplication? Is the template serving readers? If we doubled or tripled the number of articles on London pubs, would having a list in the template that's two or three times as long useful? Splitting the template up into separate templates for individual areas of London would help at this point. Thoughts? —Tom Morris (talk) 12:16, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

The template provides a useful navigation aid, and also includes a link to this article, relevant portals, A WikiProject link, etc. It was much easier adding this template to the articles (which I performed using AutoWikiBrowser), than doing so manually in See also and External links sections would have been. The template enhances the articles it is placed in, in my opinion, and also qualifies as per WP:NOTDUP. I'm all right with splitting it, but I don't really feel like going through every article again if this is performed. It took long enough performing the initial additions of the template. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:46, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Northamerica1000: Is it really helpful though? There's no distinction in the template (or this list, which it was copied from) between closed and open pubs? How does it help the reader being able to jump quickly between a restored 17th century pub in Fleet Street, a ship in the Thames, a now shut Soho lesbian bar and a national chain of cheapish pubs? Beyond being somewhere in the Greater London area, being pubs and being WP:NOTABLE, I'm not sure what unifies this rather arbitrary set of articles. Why would a reader go from one to t'other? —Tom Morris (talk) 15:55, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

I have no strong views about the list article but the template needs splitting up somehow, possibly by borough. It is already unusable before the remaining 100s (I am guessing) of Grade II listed pubs are added. A geographical split would at least enable the organisation of a pub crawl. Philafrenzy (talk) 00:14, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

{{working}} on sorting by borough at {{Pubs in London}} This is going to take some time, so please be patient. If anyone's interested in helping out, go for it. Afterward this could be split into subtemplates by borough, or left as-is. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:34, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Great work. I think the split between boroughs tells us a lot about where London Wikipedians drink! Philafrenzy (talk) 19:44, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Sorting is  Done. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:27, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Library in a Pub

In June 2018 I was in several London pubs, and they all had a "library" of old books. The staff could not tell me why the books were there on the wall, or if the patrons would make use of them, or whether the regulars would ever borrow a book. As an American booklover, I would like to know more about the pub library custom. Please answer right here.--Dthomsen8 (talk) 01:10, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Table structure - Soho

There's quite a few errors with pubs placed in the wrong borough table, so I'll work through these. At the foot of the page there's a Soho table. This might be there for a good reason, but if there's no objection I'll merge that into the City of Westminster table.AlasdairDaw (talk) 15:08, 29 September 2023 (UTC)