Pub science!

[kake]

As I mentioned earlier this week, RGL now has entries for all the current Good Beer Guide entries within its catchment area; that is, anywhere reachable with an Oystercard and the ability and willingness to walk for around 10 minutes or so.

Because I like playing with data, I wrote a little script to work out the most common pub names on the guide. I stripped out apostrophes before making the count, and also lopped off any "Ye", "Ye Olde", "Olde", or "Old" from the start of the names (RGL already leaves out any leading "The").

In the below, a "GBG pub" is a pub listed in the current (2012) edition of the Good Beer Guide. Note that RGL includes all GBG pubs in its catchment area, but not all pubs, just the ones that either we've been to or that have been listed in at least one edition of the GBG from 2007 onwards. This means that GBG and ex-GBG pubs are over-represented on RGL.

The most popular pub names among GBG pubs on RGL are "Prince of Wales" and "Red Lion" (though "Red Lion" should possibly get an extra half-point due to the Red Lion And Sun in Highgate); there are 4 of each. Next most popular, with 3 of each, are "Albion", "Hope", "J J Moons", "Mitre", "Prince Albert", and "Queen's Head".

Among pubs on RGL as a whole, the most popular name is "Red Lion", of which we have 15 (4 in the GBG), then "King's Arms" with 13 (2 in the GBG), "Prince of Wales" with 11 (4 in the GBG), "Rose And Crown" with 9 (2 in the GBG), and then "Coach And Horses", "George", "King's Head", "Queen's Head", and "Ship", all with 8 (2, 2, 0, 3, and 2 in the GBG respectively) .

Among the pub names which appear on RGL at least 5 times, the most successful is "Prince Albert", with 50% (3 of 6) of them being in the GBG. The least successful is "King's Head", with 0% (0 of 8) in the GBG.

Lowering the threshold to names appearing on RGL at least 4 times, the most successful names are "Albion", "Hope", and "J J Moons", each scoring 75%. Lowering it to 3, the most successful name is "Mitre", with 100%, while lowering it to 2 gives another 7 100% successful names, "Crown And Sceptre", "Dog And Duck", "Dove", "Lamb", "Moon And Stars", "Park Tavern", and "Railway Tavern".

Incidentally, given Freaky Trigger's Theory of Railway Pubs, it might be of interest to know that there are 10 pubs on RGL with "railway" as the only significant noun in the name, and 3 of them are in the GBG. This is a 30% success rate. Running my script again with the five-pub threshold mentioned above plus the removal of "tavern" and "inn" from pub names reveals that "Railway" is a more successful name than "Red Lion" (26.67%), "Coach And Horses" (25%), "George" (25%), "Rose And Crown" (22%), Masons Arms (20%), White Hart (20%), Royal Oak (16.67%), King's Arms (15.38%), "White Horse (14.29%), "Castle" (12.5%), "Crown" (11.11%), "King's Head" (0%) and "Plough" (0%). The only names more successful than "Railway" are "Prince Albert" (50%), "Beehive" (40%), "Queen's Head" (37.5%), "Prince Of Wales" (36.36%), "Ship" (33.33%), and "Victoria" (33.33%).

Methodological note on Railway pubs: one pub (the Great Northern Railway Tavern in Hornsey) had adjectives manually removed from its name before counting; this was not the case with any other pub names, which were counted automatically by a script that doesn't know what an adjective is. Treating Railway pubs the same way as other pubs increases their success rate to 33.33%, meaning that there are only four more successful pub names rather than six.

Methodological note on success criterion: it is certainly not the case that every pub in the Good Beer Guide is a good pub, and every pub not in the Good Beer Guide is a bad pub. These just happen to be the data I have available in quantity.