Measured on one consistent database five years apart, every one of the ten most common pub names lost pubs, at rates clustered between 4.5% and 9.6%. Seven of the ten held their exact rank. Pub names aren't dying off one by one - the whole stock is thinning at roughly the same speed.
Britain has been losing pubs every year on record. On the industry's own count, the total fell from 60,800 in 2000 to 45,000 in 2024 — a quarter of the stock, gone.12 Other trackers use different definitions and land on different totals, but all of them show the same direction of travel, so this piece uses one consistent series throughout rather than reconciling several.
Pub names can be counted the same way, if you use one directory consistently. Pubs Galore, a crowdsourced listing of open British pubs that normalises common spelling variants, published a top ten in 2021; its live ranking today gives the same ten names.34 Every single one has fewer pubs than it did five years ago, and the losses land in a remarkably narrow band. Swan lost least at 4.5% and Plough most at 9.6%, but eight of the ten sit between 6.7% and 8.7% — a two-point spread. Together the ten went from 3,409 pubs to 3,161, a combined loss of 7.3%. Red Lion, the most common name in Britain, lost 38 pubs, or 6.9%, putting it within a tenth of a point of the group average.
That is a different picture from the one a shorter window suggests. A separate count, drawn from UK phonebook business listings rather than a pub directory, reported Red Lion rising from 468 in 2023 to 517 in 2025.56 Pubs Galore has Red Lion falling from 548 to 510 over a longer, overlapping period. The two databases disagree on the direction of travel for Britain's most common pub name, and this piece leads with the pub directory because both of its readings come from the same source under the same normalisation rules — but the disagreement is real and unresolved, not something to wave away.
The clearest look at what's actually changing comes from pubs opened recently, not the stock of existing ones. Among pubs registered in the UK since 2020, Red Lion is still the single most popular choice — more new pubs took that name than any other, ahead of Royal Oak and a tie between White Horse and the shortened "Crown."5 Two-thirds of all newly registered names since 2020 were animal- or royalty-themed, while three of the thirteen categories the source tracks — sport, religious and food names — recorded exactly zero new pubs: no new Cricketers, no new Angels, no new Shoulders of Mutton.5 New pubs are also dropping "Inn" from traditional names: only 16% of pubs opened since 2020 include it, against 28% of the stock overall.5 George is the one genuinely new face in the top ten of new registrations — ten of the 87 pubs now carrying that name were registered in three years.5 Further down the wider rankings, a handful of unmistakably modern names — The Botanist, The Alchemist, Bar + Block — now have enough branches to register at all.4
No public body records pub renamings as such — not the Food Standards Agency's premises register, not Companies House, not any licensing authority. So a name losing pubs cannot be separated into its causes: those pubs may have closed, been renamed, or simply dropped out of a crowdsourced directory that depends on volunteers noticing. Pubs Galore's own coverage and its rules for grouping variants may have shifted between the two snapshots, which would move the counts without a single pub changing. The 2021 figures reach us through a local news report rather than the directory's own archive, and that report's prose and table disagree by one pub on four of the ten names. Two independently built databases also disagree on whether Red Lion is growing or shrinking. What survives all of that is the pattern rather than any single number: ten names moving the same way, by similar amounts, in a near-fixed order.