It’s finally happened – pints in London now cost £8

We come bearing some bad news – the price of a pub pint in the capital has finally reached a massive £8.

It’s not much of a surprise – a couple of years ago we ran a piece saying that the £10 pint was on its way, but it still hurts. The pub in question was the Nag’s Head in Belgravia, a gorgeous little backstreet boozer which features on our 50 Best Pubs in London list, where a pint of lager will now set you back £8 (with a half at £4).

Was it a fancy lager, I hear you ask? Alas, it was a Fosters. Guinness will also set you back two quid short of a tenner at this particular establishment – but it will come out of an authentic 1960s toucan tap. 

Sure, this particular pub is in one of London’s posher neighbourhoods, which might explain the hefty cost, but pint prices have been steadily rising across the capital for years. A pint of Guinness at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich is £7.95, and if you want a Brixton Coldharbour Lager at the same pub that’ll be £8.80, thank you very much. 

In 2022 reported that the price of an average pint in London could go up to £10.50 by the end of the decade, according to modelling by analysts Admiral Markets, but by the sounds of things, the £10 pint might be here far sooner. 

A pint for less than a fiver in London (at a non Wetherspoons pub) is now a real rarity, but another Nag’s Head – the one on Rye Lane in Peckham – boasts of having the cheapest pint of Guinness in the capital, at £3.85 in February, according to Amazing Guinness on X. 

Did you see that Heineken is reopening 62 pubs across the UK this year?

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