Sources — Where the Dates on OldPubs Come From

Every pub page lists its own sources, and no pub gets a page until two separate publishers can be cited for it — two links to the same organisation count once. This is the whole list, counted from the data: 657 publishers, cited 1773 times across 351 researched pubs, of which 340 currently have pages.

They are grouped by the weight we give them. How we date a pub explains the order and why it matters: a national heritage list is evidence, a pub's own history page is a record of what the pub claims.

Heritage bodies, archives and public records

These carry the most weight. A listing entry, a licensing roll or a national inventory record is written by someone with no interest in the answer being romantic.

39 of those citations are links to an archived copy of a page rather than to the page itself, usually because the original has since gone or its security certificate has expired. Each one is counted above against the body that published it, not against the archive that copied it.

Registers that say a house is still trading

A hygiene rating, a health inspection or a company register tells you a business was operating on the day it was checked. That is worth citing — it is often the only current evidence that a pub still pours — and it is no evidence at all of when the house began. Nothing on this site takes a date from one of these.

Trade and enthusiast surveys

Careful, useful and often the only current record of whether a pub is open — but compiled by volunteers and trade bodies rather than archivists, so they support a date rather than settle it.

Local history, press and the pubs themselves

Local historians turn up things nobody else has. Newspapers record closures and reopenings first. A pub's own history page is cited as evidence of what the pub claims, never as evidence of what happened.

Facebook appears here for one reason: 5 of these pubs are cited from a Facebook page, which stands as the pub's own notice of whether it is still open. All but one have no web address at all — CAMRA's entries for two of them say so in as many words. The exception is Grace Neill's in Donaghadee, whose own site answers but carries a security certificate that expired in August 2026, so a browser now refuses it: what is cited here is an archived copy of that site, and the link on its page goes to Facebook. Facebook is never cited for a date, and never for a photograph.

Instagram appears once, and for the same reason: Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada publishes nothing else that answers. Its own site's security certificate has expired, so a browser refuses the page and no website is listed for it here. The account is cited for whether the cantina is still open and for nothing else; its 1892 is its own history page's.

Being linked is a wider thing than being cited: 11 pubs on this site have a Facebook page as the only web address we hold for them, so that is where the "Pub website" button goes. Six of those are not in the count above, because nothing on their page rests on the Facebook post — the link is there so a reader can find the opening hours we do not publish.

What we do not use

Aggregator sites that copy each other, listicles with no citations, and AI-written history pages. If the only support for a date is another website repeating it, the date stays graded C however many times it appears.

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, Geograph, Flickr, Mapillary and public library and heritage archives, and only under open licences that allow reuse with credit, or in the public domain. Each is credited where it appears — beside the photograph, or under the grid of thumbnails it sits in — and in full on the image credits page. We never use a pub's own photographs, or images from Google, TripAdvisor or social media.

Licences we rely on

Listing descriptions from the National Heritage List for England, Cadw and Historic Environment Scotland contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Pub positions come from OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database Licence, and place names from GeoNames under its open licence. Where a coordinate cannot be found under a licence that allows us to publish it, the pub keeps its page and simply has no pin.

Our own work — the claimed dates, the records traced against them, the grades and the reasoning — goes back out free to reuse with credit. The dataset explains what each column holds and how to credit it, so an argument with our conclusions can be had over the same rows.

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