THE public house, once a linchpin of British nightlife, is in decline. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, the total number of watering holes in Blighty has fallen by 25% since 1982, to 50,800. During the same period, Britain's population has risen by 16%. Why are pubs falling out of favour?

Changing consumer preferences are largely to blame. Beer consumption in Britain peaked in 1978; it started to decline precipitously in 2003. Many Britons have switched to wine, while others are simply drinking less.

The decline has been especially pronounced in London, where the total number of pubs fell from around 4,835 in 2001 to 3,615 in 2016. The closures have been widespread: the number of alehouses has fallen in 31 of the city’s 32 boroughs. Only Hackney, a trendy patch in the east, has been spared.

A recent analysis by Noah Carl, a researcher at Oxford University, examined a series of possible explanations for why more pubs were closing in certain areas of London than in others. Measured at the level of the city’s 32 boroughs, which have roughly 250,000 people each, he found two variables that were associated with greater levels of net pub closures. Boroughs that had more pubs to begin with lost a larger share of them, suggesting that they may have been oversaturated. And pubs in boroughs with a growing population of Muslims, whose religion forbids drinking, saw particularly large drop-offs.

Probing further, Mr Carl then explored these factors at the more detailed level of wards, which tend to contain only around 15,000 people. Such data can be unreliable because the numbers of pubs in wards are rounded to the nearest multiple of five. With this caveat, he found that whereas the relationship between the original number of pubs and the proportion that closed was replicated at the ward level, the percentage of Muslims in a ward did not affect the number of pubs.

A third potential explanation is geographical. Returning to the borough level, areas on London’s periphery saw bigger percentage declines than those in the wealthy city centre. For example, the number of boozers in Westminster, a commercial area filled with tourists and hedge-fund analysts, fell by just 15% between 2001 and 2016, while in Lewisham, a poorer area in the south-east, it dropped by 41%. Perhaps workers are increasingly choosing to grab a pint by the office, rather than waiting until they get home to stop by their locals. Many of London’s social woes, such as its persistent housing crisis, are blamed on the rich. But it appears that the fall of the pub should not be counted among them.