Is your pub f*cked? We interviewed the creator of the viral website

Your local pub is probably fucked. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

A combination of spiralling bills, draconian rules, the ongoing cost of living crisis and an growing demographic who prefer a protein shake to a pint has left the hospitality industry on its knees.

The government has done its utmost to worsen the situation by increasing the employer's contribution to national insurance and hiking the minimum wage. (Wanna get a summer job at your local? They literally can't afford to hire you.) Now pubs, restaurants and cafes face their taxes potentially rising by the thousands due to a proposed revaluation of business rates. 

For Ben Guerin, co-founder of creative agency Topham-Guerin, enough is enough. He's created a website pithily entitled Is My Pub Fucked? that estimates the increased individual cost facing single pub in the country. Type in the name of any pub and you'll see where it ranks on the FPI (fucked pub index): 'somehow fine', 'feeling it', 'struggling', 'fucked', 'absolutely fucked'. There's even a colour-coded map so you can peruse your area. 

We spoke to Guerin about creating the index, the state of UK hospitality, and whether the industry can be saved.  

SM: What made you create the website?

BG: So, I’ve been in the UK for ten years. I’m from New Zealand originally. One of the things that’s always attracted me to this place is the pub culture. Honestly, it’s right up there with cricket and winning the World Wars as things that the Brits are terrifically good at. There’s something about standing in a gutter in early December while it’s absolutely pouring down that just makes life worth living. I’ve always loved pubs.

I’ve got a bunch of great locals around me in Wandsworth. My mate and I were discussing, “Where should we go this Friday?” We both run businesses, and we’ve been paying business rates and watching the numbers go up. And we thought, well, if we can give our patronage to a business that’s been really badly hit by these changes, then why not?

That’s basically why I built the website – self-interest at first. But then I thought other people might be interested in it as well. So I gave it a funny name and stuck it on the internet.

SM: And how does it work?

BG: Yeah. So essentially, the good thing about England and Wales is that every couple of years, the Valuation Office Agency – the VOA, the agency – publishes a spreadsheet with every single business property in the country and what its business rates valuation is assessed at. That’s not property value, by the way. That’s just the amount on which the land is worth for a business.

There’s a pretty significant increase in that spreadsheet from 2023, when they last did it, to 2026, which are the provisional numbers. Anyone can download that. It’s a huge file, but it’s publicly available. What I did was download the sheet for 2023 and the sheet for 2026, then wrote a bit of programming to join the spreadsheets together so you could match the same pubs across both sheets, and then did a bit of maths to work out what the change had been.

That’s the data that sits underneath it. How the website works is essentially like this: on the homepage, if you type in your postcode, it will recommend one pub based on a combination of your location and the severity of their rating. Basically, it finds the pub you should go to right now. Then you can go to a map view and scroll around your area to see a colour-coded scale of all the pubs and their scores. There’s also a leaderboard of the most ‘fucked’” pubs in Britain, and there’s another search view to see other pubs near you.

Last night I built a new feature for a pub crawl. It’s still a little buggy, but I’m fixing it up at the moment. Basically, it lets you either use your location or type in any postcode, and then it suggests a pub crawl for you. You can do a quick crawl, which will find five pubs that make sense to go to one after another, or you can add any combination of pubs, and it will join a route together. Then you can share a link to that pub crawl with your mates. That’s what I’ll be doing this weekend.

A screenshot of the Kennington area. Not looking good for the Prince of Wales

SM: I notice some pubs on the map have already closed down – which totally proves your point!

BG: Absolutely. Anyone who’s built software knows that an app is only as good as the data it has access to. In this case, the VOA rates the value of a property, regardless of whether there’s a profitable business on top of it or not. I could change the language on the site to say, “This is what the government rates any business on this location to be worth,” – but that’s the reality. If a new pub opens there, they’re going to have to pay the rates that the pub is supposedly worth.

SM: Talk us through the response.

BG: It went live on Thursday night and got 100,000 views in 24 hours. It went surprisingly well on Reddit too. I posted it to the UK Reddit and politics Reddit. I was really surprised, because I always thought political conversations were happening mainly on Twitter, but I got the same number of referrals from Reddit as I did from Twitter.

SM: Has anyone from a position of authority reached out? Someone from the government, a landlord, a pub chain?

BG: A huge number of pub landlords and others have reached out, talking about the decisions they’re having to make to deal with these rising costs. People have pointed out two things, really. First, it’s not just pubs. You’ve also got hotels, restaurants, cafés, comedy clubs, concert venues – all hit by these same rateable value increases. The government signalled a potential U-turn on pubs, but that doesn’t really help any of these other types of businesses.

Second, business rates are big. They might be 30, 40 thousand pounds a year for a pub, but VAT can be three, four hundred thousand pounds per year. A lot of people in hospitality argue for European-style VAT treatment for pubs, which makes sense. Most European countries have much lower VAT for hospitality venues, and that’s why you see great nightlife in cities like Berlin, Barcelona, and Paris. But here in the UK, pubs pay the standard rate.

The VAT structure is already insanely complicated. If it were simple, then you could argue there’s no need for exceptions. But given the number of weird caveats in the UK system, this is something that really should be considered. I’ve been learning a lot about the challenges pubs face just from people pointing this out.

SM: Man, it’s interesting you brought up Europe. Bars and pubs stay open far later – not even talking nightclubs here, just places where you can have a beer and a chat. Whereas Soho now feels like a ghost town after midnight.

BG: If you bought an apartment in Soho, you bought it for a reason: to be in the middle of the nightlife. To say, “We’ve got to protect local residents” – Soho has been a party destination for 500 years!

SM: The Railway in Tulse Hill (91% increase, 'struggling') won’t even let people take drinks into the smoking area after half past ten, apparently because one person complained.

BG: I genuinely don’t know why anyone would start a pub today. We’re very fortunate that masochists exist who take the hit, work the stupid hours, make no money, all for the love of the game.

Breaking down the damage

SM: I assume it must be council-driven? Because if local councils were siding with pubs on noise complaints, it would probably be less of an issue.

BG: Yeah, that’s part of it, but it’s just one piece of a bigger problem facing pubs. You’ve got local planning decisions – if a pub wants to build a pagoda to keep punters dry or upgrade their seating area, they need council approval.

Then there are noise complaints, the business rates challenge, an uncompetitive VAT environment compared to Europe, employer national insurance going up, the minimum wage rising, and the fact that pubs used to hire lots of high school grads locally, but now might have to cut back. On top of that, there are extra compliance costs and other requirements.

Something’s got to give. These weren’t high-margin businesses to begin with, so it’s no wonder independent pubs are being replaced by massive pub groups.

SM: Most people know a pub that’s shut down in the past couple of years – I can think of three in Streatham. (Pour one out for The Mere Scribbler, The Rabbit Hole, and Pratts & Payne.) 

BG: I’m in Battersea, I published the website on Thursday. By Saturday morning, the Battersea Beat Instagram page reported The Candlemaker on Battersea High Street shutting down – literally the closest pub to me. It was a great pub – comedy nights, barbecue kitchen-style food, a mental cocktail list. Normally pretty busy, but couldn’t make it work.

SM: Why do you think there’s so little protection for pubs?

BG: The loudest voices get the most help. Pubs are fragmented. Big pub groups have different needs than brewers, which differ from small indies. Ale fans want one thing, lager fans another. It’s a fragmented industry, hard to speak with one voice. There’s only so much money to go around, and the government will take from whoever it can. But this can change. People can stand up and say, “This is where we draw the line.” If enough people make a fuss, the government will learn.

Also, the Treasury made a mistake at the budget. They announced a massive package to support pubs but didn’t account for the underlying valuations increasing by so much. They’re trying to backtrack now, but it’s just a bit janky.

SM: The rise in employer national insurance seems huge. I’m no economist, but I can tell that’s going to hit small businesses hard.

BG: Exactly. And here’s the thing. I’ve been using the website myself to plan every meeting. Meeting friends from East and South London? “Let’s meet near London Bridge.” I looked at the map and found the Rose and Crown, which is 'absolutely fucked' on the website, and I’d never heard of it before.

I went there. Amazing pub. Great ambiance, craft burger-style food, really thoughtful menu, an incredible cocktail and independent lager selection. It’s become one of my favourite local pubs in South London – and I only found it because the business rates are messed up.

SM: That’s a nice note of optimism. The worry is that people will protest by not going to pubs, because seven-pound pints in London are pricey. Hospitality may have to hit a crisis point before the government actively helps.

BG: Exactly. It’s not just pubs: cafes, for instance, are hit hard too. The average transaction is much lower, seven or eight pounds for a coffee and a croissant, but they occupy just as much space as pubs. How they make money is beyond me. Being a café owner is a terrible position.

SM: Especially now with health trends. Fewer people doing a couple of pints on a Friday and a full English the next morning.

BG: But pubs have a powerful emotional appeal. You can go and have a great time without ordering alcohol. Buy a Coke if you want – pubs actually have the highest margin on soft drinks. Enjoy the atmosphere; you never know how long they’ll be around.

SM: Pubs are more than businesses. They create communities. Lose a pub, and you lose that community. You can’t replace it with apartments or office blocks.

BG: Or another Costa and a Greggs.

SM: Exactly! You can’t spend five hours at Greggs with friends, happily chatting as you tuck into a few sausage rolls.

BG: That’s the point. Few places let you meet friends at lunchtime and leave at ten at night, having made memories, met new people, and supported your community. Pubs are unique that way. If we can do one tiny thing to save them, we should.

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