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More Beer Guide London statistics: the Guide in 2020
We started 2020 with 323 Guide entries (this includes pubs, brewery taps, tap rooms, bottle shop bars, etc) and, rather bizarrely, we end the year with 323. Not surprisingly, this year saw a sharp reduction in the number of new places added to the Guide: from a record total of 80 in 2019, in 2020 we added just 25. Only four of those 25 were added after mid March.
Balancing the 25 new entries were 25 deletions, and while many of these are due to the pandemic, this is not the case for them all. Regular housekeeping means some places were deleted as they no longer met the grade. However, 12 deletions were pre March lockdown, and 13 have happened since, and all but one of the 13 were due to business closures.
Of the 323 current Guide entries:
- 74 survive from pre-2014 when we put the Guide on line;
- new entries from 2014 which survive total 22;
- from 2015 there are 22;
- from 2016 there are 20;
- from 2017 there are 26;
- from 2018 there are 65;
- from 2019 there are 69,
- and there were 25 new entries in 2020 which have made it to the year end. (NB: for the purposes of this report, all current temporary pandemic related closures have been ignored.)
In all, 77% of all current Guide entries are new since January 2014, though the pace of change has slowed for obvious reasons during 2020.
Some other stats: 64 Guide entries are brewery taps (at the start of 2020 there were 67); 41 are bottle shop bars (at the start of the year 45), and 21 are brewpubs (up from 18 at the start of 2020). Combined, the 126 places in these three categories represent 39% of all Guide entries, which is hugely significant given the combined total across all three categories when we started the Guide six years ago was just 15 (and of those 15, three are pubs now counted as brewpubs, but they didn’t brew at that time). Finally, of the 41 bottle shop bars in the Guide, precisely none of them were open when we started the Guide at the start of 2014.
