Pubs Trivia
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45 free Pubs trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pubs are where Britain and Ireland have argued, celebrated and quizzed for centuries, and their story is stranger than the average regular suspects. Kings legislated about them, wartime governments nationalised them, and one Cambridge pub heard one of the great scientific announcements of the 20th century over lunch. These 45 questions cover the inns that claim to be the oldest, the names on the boards outside, the games played in the back room, what a pint glass and a firkin actually hold, the laws that shaped opening hours, the most famous pubs of soap opera, film and fiction, and how the pub quiz itself began. Use it as a ready-made round for your own quiz night, a warm-up for the team, or a solo test of how well you know your local. Every answer comes with a short explanation and a source.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tim Martin named his pub chain Wetherspoon, founded in 1979, after one of his what in New Zealand?
Schoolteachers
Schoolteachers: Wetherspoon was the surname of a teacher from Martin's New Zealand school days, in one telling a man who could not control his class, while the 'JD' comes from JD Hogg of The Dukes of Hazzard.
Q 02Once a pub's doors are locked for a lock-in, what are the drinkers still inside said to have become?
A private party
A private party is the legal fiction behind the lock-in: regulars put money behind the bar before closing time, so that no drink is technically sold once the doors are locked.
Q 03From 1916 to 1919, Britain's state-run pubs forbade customers from doing what?
Buying rounds of drinks
Buying rounds of drinks was banned from 1916 to 1919 under the State Management Scheme, which nationalised the pubs and breweries around the Gretna munitions factories.
Q 04What did Francis Crick announce to lunchtime drinkers at the Eagle in Cambridge on 28 February 1953?
The structure of DNA
The structure of DNA: Crick told the pub he and James Watson had 'discovered the secret of life', an anecdote Watson retold in The Double Helix and now marked by a blue plaque beside the door.
Q 05William Booth's 1865 sermon outside Whitechapel's Blind Beggar pub led to the founding of what?
The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army grew out of the East London Christian Mission that Booth set up after that sermon; a century later, in 1966, Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell dead at the bar of the same pub.
Q 06What did the crown stamp on a British pint glass certify before the EU's CE mark replaced it?
That it held a full measure
That it held a full measure: the crown showed that an agency of the Crown had certified the glass, and in September 2021, after Brexit, the stamp's return to UK pint glasses was announced.
Q 07Pub quizzes took off in Britain when Burns and Porter sold them to breweries to do what?
Fill pubs on quiet nights
Fill pubs on quiet nights was the pitch: Sharon Burns and Tom Porter were soon supplying quizzes to thousands of teams every week, and went on to work for the BBC as well.
Q 08The Rovers Return, in the fictional town of Weatherfield, is the pub of which ITV soap?
Coronation Street
Coronation Street's Rovers Return was built by the brewery Newton and Ridley, opened in 1902 and was named for the safe return of Lieutenant Philip Ridley from the Boer War.
Q 09Which BBC soap's pub, the Queen Victoria, stands on Albert Square in the borough of Walford?
EastEnders
EastEnders' Albert Square is named after Prince Albert, husband of the pub's namesake Queen Victoria, and the Queen Vic set was once burnt down in a storyline, and in reality, so it could be rebuilt.
Q 10Richard II's 1393 law making landlords hang out a sign helped which officials find alehouses?
Ale tasters
Ale tasters, the borough inspectors who judged the quality of each brew, could then spot alehouses easily, and with much of the medieval population illiterate, pictures beat words on the boards.
Q 11Which common pub name may come from John of Gaunt's personal badge or from the royal arms of Scotland?
The Red Lion
The Red Lion is often called Britain's commonest pub name; one story has James VI of Scotland, on taking the English throne in 1603, ordering his red lion shown on important buildings, pubs included.
Q 12Which animal, Richard II's livery badge, became a popular name for inns and taverns during his reign?
A white hart
A white hart was Richard II's own badge, and when his 1393 law made alehouses hang out a sign, many landlords are said to have picked the king's emblem; it is still one of England's commonest pub names.
Q 13Which Athlone pub was certified in 2004 by Guinness World Records as the oldest in Ireland?
Q 21From which Southwark inn, established in 1307, do Chaucer's pilgrims set out in The Canterbury Tales?
The Tabard
The Tabard catered for pilgrims heading to Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral, and Chaucer made it the meeting point for his own pilgrims in the 1380s.
Q 22Which highwayman is said to have been a regular at the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath?
Dick Turpin
Dick Turpin's supposed haunt later drew the poets Byron and Keats, and the pub claims that Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale in its garden; it also turns up in The Pickwick Papers and Dracula.
Q 23What earned the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden its old nickname, the Bucket of Blood?
Bare-knuckle prize fights
Sean's Bar
Sean's Bar is reputed to have been established in AD 900, and renovations in the 1970s found a back wall partly built of wattle and wicker.
Q 14The Bingley Arms in Yorkshire, self-styled oldest pub in Britain, says it once served as a safe house for whom?
Catholic priests
Catholic priests are said to have sheltered at the Bardsey pub, once called The Priests Inn; it dates its history to between 905 and 953, yet the building standing today is 18th century.
Q 15What lies behind Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem in Nottingham, believed to be the castle's old brewhouse?
Sandstone caves
Sandstone caves carved into Castle Rock may be as old as the Norman castle above them, while the pub's own claimed founding date of 1189 has no documentary evidence behind it.
Q 16Which Wapping pub claims the site of London's oldest riverside tavern, dating from around 1520?
The Prospect of Whitby
The Prospect of Whitby, once so rough it was known as the Devil's Tavern, took its present name from a collier that moored alongside it, bringing sea coal from Newcastle to London.
Q 17Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street was home for some 40 years to which foul-mouthed celebrity?
An African grey parrot
An African grey parrot, Polly swore at the customers and mimicked popping champagne corks; when she died in 1926, around 200 newspapers across the world ran obituaries.
Q 18Which writer described his ideal pub, the imaginary Moon Under Water, in a 1946 newspaper essay?
Orwell
Orwell's ten requirements began with uncompromisingly Victorian fittings, and the essay became so well loved that the Wetherspoon chain has named a string of its pubs The Moon Under Water.
Q 19Tolkien and C. S. Lewis belonged to which Oxford writers' group that met at the Eagle and Child pub?
The Inklings
The Inklings met at the pub for beer and talk in a back room called the Rabbit Room, but the readings of work in progress took place on Thursday evenings in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College.
Q 20Which Southwark pub, named in Dickens's Little Dorrit, is London's last galleried survivor of the coaching age?
The George Inn
The George Inn is only part of what it was: the Great Northern Railway pulled down other ranges round its yard, and only the galleried south side still stands.
Bare-knuckle prize fights in the upstairs room gave the pub its nickname in a then-violent corner of Covent Garden, and a plaque recalls the 1679 attack on the poet John Dryden in a nearby alley.
Q 24Which body bought Belfast's gas-lit Crown Liquor Saloon in 1978, urged on by Sir John Betjeman?
The National Trust
The National Trust restored the Victorian interior three years later for £400,000, keeping its ten booths with their gun-metal match-strikers and a bell system for summoning staff.
Q 25Which 1914 wartime law had beer watered down and pub hours cut to a lunchtime and an evening session?
Defence of the Realm Act
Defence of the Realm Act rules also banned flying kites, lighting bonfires and buying binoculars, and the afternoon gap they put into pub opening hours outlived the war by seventy years.
Q 26Which nation's pubs were shut on Sundays by an 1881 Act, a rule its last dry district kept until 1996?
Wales
Wales got the Sunday Closing Act in 1881, the first law since annexation that applied only to Wales, and local referendums from 1961 gradually let districts go 'wet' on Sundays.
Q 27Which prime minister's government ended the afternoon closing imposed on English pubs in the First World War?
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher's government passed the 1988 Licensing Act, which let pubs serve straight through from 11am to 11pm six days a week; Sunday kept its afternoon break until 1995.
Q 28The 1989 Beer Orders forced big brewers to let their own pubs sell at least one what?
Guest ale
Guest ale: each landlord could choose one traditional draught beer from any other supplier, and the same orders pushed the biggest brewers to shed thousands of pubs, which new pub companies sprang up to buy.
Q 29What is a pub called when a brewery owns it and obliges the landlord to stock that brewery's beer?
A tied house
A tied house gave a brewery a guaranteed outlet, which is why brewers raced to buy up pubs in the late 19th century; a pub that can choose its own beers is called a free house.
Q 30Which room of a traditional pub had frosted glass above head height so nobody could see who was drinking?
The snug
The snug let people drink unseen, women above all, at a time when many frowned on them visiting a pub; very few classic snugs survive in British pubs today.