Things you probably didn’t know about pubs

• The longest pub name in the UK belongs to a Stalybridge public house: The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn.
• Many Scottish pubs market themselves as ‘hotels’ due to a law, abolished in 1976, stipulating that only hotels could serve booze on Sundays.
• Fretting about the overindulgence of Britons has a long history. Back in 965 AD King Edgar passed a law decreeing that each village could have no more than one alehouse
• The preponderance of animals in pub names is attributable to the illiteracy of most of the population. Upon seeing the picture of horse, swan or dog a thirsty labourer could be sure that he’d espied a watering hole.
• Pubs date back to Roman times, with inns or ‘tabernae’ established along Roman roads.
• Before clean water was widely accessible, beer was actually the most regularly consumed beverage and consumed frequently even by children. Weak compared to most of today’s beers, it was used to wean problem drinkers of gin. People must have walked around every day, all day, ever so slightly tipsy. 
• Some of the best pub names – seen by this author at any rate – include In the Dog House in Southwark, The Murderers in Norwich, the Land O’ Cakes in Manchester (now closed) and the Perseverance in Islington.
• The smallest pub in Britain, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, measuring just five metres by two metres.
• OK, so you probably do know about this one – or at least it won’t surprise you: the most popular pub name in Britain is the Red Lion, closely followed by the Crown.
• BusinessesForSale.com has the largest directory of pubs for sale in the world
  

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