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50 free Pubs trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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.
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Q 01Tim Martin named his pub chain Wetherspoon, founded in 1979, after one of his what in New Zealand?
Schoolteachers
Schoolteachers: Wetherspoon was a teacher of Martin's in New Zealand known for being unable to control his class, much like the first pub, while the 'J D' comes from J. D. 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: the British lock-in began as a reaction to 1915 wartime licensing changes that cut opening hours, and regulars put money behind the bar before closing so no drink is technically sold afterwards.
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 began as the East London Christian Mission, which Booth set up after that open-air sermon; the pub itself is named after a ballad, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green.
Q 06What did the crown stamp on a British pint glass certify, before an EU mark replaced it in 2007?
That it held a full measure
That it held a full measure: the crown showed an agency of the Crown had certified the glass, the CE mark took over in 2007, and in September 2021 the crown's return to UK pint glasses was announced.
Q 07Which firm popularised the pub quiz in 1970s Britain, growing weekly events from 30 teams to 10,000?
Burns and Porter
Burns and Porter ran weekly quizzes from the 1970s whose entrants swelled from 30 teams to 10,000, though the first printed mention of a pub quiz dates back to 1959.
Q 08The Rovers Return, in the fictional Lancashire town of Weatherfield, is the pub of which ITV soap?
Coronation Street
Coronation Street's Rovers opened in 1902, the coronation year of Edward VII, and was originally split into three separate bars, with drinks half a penny cheaper in one of them.
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 11Britain's first pubs, the tabernae that gave English 'tavern', appeared along the roads of which people?
The Romans
The Romans built the road network that the first tabernae followed, although ale itself was a native British drink before the legions arrived in the first century.
Q 12Which 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 among the most common names both in heraldry and on pub signs, its possible origins being a local landowner's arms, John of Gaunt's badge or the Scottish royal arms joined to England's in 1603.
Q 13Which animal, Richard II's livery badge, became a popular name for inns and taverns during his reign?
Q 21Which Southwark pub is London's only surviving galleried coaching inn, a haunt of Charles Dickens?
The George Inn
The George Inn appears in Dickens's Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, its Middle Bar was once the Coffee Room he frequented, and galleried inns like it may have staged Elizabethan plays.
Q 22From 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 23Which highwayman reputedly frequented Hampstead's Spaniards Inn, where his father had been landlord?
Dick Turpin
A white hart
A white hart, the heraldic name for a mature stag, was Richard II's livery badge; it proved so popular during his reign that many later inns and taverns adopted the name too.
Q 14Which Athlone pub was certified in 2004 by Guinness World Records as the oldest in Ireland?
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 15Which pub, originally The Priests Inn, calls itself Britain's oldest, dating its history to between 905 and 953?
The Bingley Arms
The Bingley Arms in Bardsey says it served as a safe house for persecuted Catholic priests and, from around 1000, as a courthouse whose offenders went to the pillory across the road.
Q 16What 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 date from the castle's founding in 1067, while the pub's claimed start of 1189 has no documentary evidence behind it.
Q 17Which Wapping pub claims the site of London's oldest riverside tavern, dating from around 1520?
The Prospect of Whitby
The Prospect of Whitby got its present name after an early 19th-century fire, when the rebuilt tavern was renamed after a Tyne collier that used to berth alongside it with sea coal from Newcastle.
Q 18Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street was for 40 years associated with Polly, a foul-mouthed what?
An African grey parrot
An African grey parrot, Polly was famous for expletive-laden outbursts and for mimicking the pop of champagne corks, at a pub rebuilt soon after the Great Fire of 1666 and frequented by Dickens.
Q 19Which writer described his ideal pub, the imaginary Moon Under Water, in a 1946 newspaper essay?
Orwell
Orwell listed ten requirements for his perfect London pub, starting with uncompromisingly Victorian architecture and fittings, in what proved his last piece for the Evening Standard.
Q 20Tolkien 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 Eagle and Child, nicknamed the Bird and Baby, a St Giles' pub that closed its doors in March 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dick Turpin's supposed haunt was also visited by Byron and Keats, and the pub claims Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale in its gardens and that Bram Stoker borrowed one of its ghost stories for Dracula.
Q 24What earned the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden its old nickname, the Bucket of Blood?
Bare-knuckle prize fights
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 25Which 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 26Which Black Country pub was gutted by fire in August 2023, then demolished against council orders?
The Crooked House
The Crooked House leaned about 15 degrees after 19th-century mining left one end 4 feet lower than the other, earning it the billing 'Britain's wonkiest pub' before the 2023 fire.
Q 27Which English city's pubs were nationalised in 1916 because of the munitions works at nearby Gretna?
Carlisle
Carlisle's 'State Management Scheme' ran the city's pubs and breweries until Edward Heath's government privatised it in 1971, selling the assets at auction mostly to established brewers.
Q 28Which 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 restrictions set pub hours at 12 noon to 3pm and 6:30pm to 9:30pm, and the same law banned flying kites, lighting bonfires and buying binoculars.
Q 29Which 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 30In which year were English pubs first allowed to stay open all afternoon since the First World War?
1988
1988's Licensing Act let pubs serve from 11am to 11pm without a break from 22 August that year, the first all-day opening in almost 75 years, though Sundays still shut at 3pm.