Most people would struggle to name twenty-five thousand places they have ever been. Peter Hill can name twenty-five thousand pubs. The 70-year-old father of two from West Bromwich, West Midlands, has just crossed a threshold that no one else on the planet has reached: his 25,000th different pub, part of a journey officially recognised by Guinness World Records as the longest pub crawl in history. It began in 1984, when a pint of lager cost 64p and the idea of a proper pub crawl meant sitting at the kitchen table with a dog-eared A-Z, a stack of Yellow Pages and a very long pencil. Over the past 42 years, Hill has averaged eleven pubs a week, sunk an estimated 60,000 pints and spent roughly £336,000 on beer, travel, food and accommodation. On Friday 16 October, he raised a glass at the Old Royal Library in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, to celebrate the milestone. “My 25,000th pub was a cracking pub, with brilliant company and a great gaffer. We had a tremendous day,” he said. For a man who has spent more than four decades doing what most people only joke about, the moment was both a triumph and a perfectly ordinary Friday afternoon in the pub. That, perhaps, is the point: the extraordinary, for Peter Hill, has become a way of life. It is not a record built in a single grand gesture, but one accumulated pub by pub, pint by pint, in every corner of the country, from city-centre bars to remote island inns, from the familiar warmth of his local to a newly discovered taproom two hundred miles away. The 60,000 pints he has drunk are not just a statistic; they are a collection of hours spent in good company, of conversations had, of birthdays celebrated and quiet evenings enjoyed. And at the centre of it all is a man who simply loves a pint and refuses to stop.
The scale of what Hill has achieved is hard to overstate. He has drunk in every pub listed in the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide, visited every pub in Wales, had at least one pint in every British county and raised a glass on 69 islands around the UK. His travels have taken him more than 410,000 miles, and he has done it all while maintaining a remarkably down-to-earth routine. Each week, he meets with his friends in the Black Country Ale Tairsters, a group that formed after they grew tired of drinking in the same local. They gather in their regular pub to plan the next adventure, then head off across the country in a spirit of cheerful determination. “It’s a great laugh,” says Hill, who often travels solo but treasures the company of the ten or so friends who still join him. The Tairsters began by working their way through 300 pubs listed on a map handed out by the local Banks brewery in Wolverhampton. When they reached the end, they didn’t stop. They simply looked for another challenge, then another, and in doing so turned a local hobby into a national odyssey. Along the way, they have raised money for charities, but the real currency has always been friendship and the simple pleasure of discovering what lies beyond the front door of yet another pub. The group’s travels have taken them to seaside towns, industrial cities, remote villages and island communities, and they have learned that every pub has its own character, its own regulars and its own story. For Hill, that endless variety is what keeps the mission alive. He is not chasing perfection; he is chasing the next welcome, the next friendly face, the next chance to sit down with a beer and let the day unfold.
Planning a pub crawl in 1984 was not a matter of tapping an app. Hill would go to the county town, visit the library, work through the Yellow Pages, buy maps and an A-Z, and plot every pub himself. Pubs used to close in the afternoon, opening from 11am to 2pm and then again from 6pm to 10.30pm, so route-finding was a logistical puzzle. “Don’t forget, pubs used to open from 11am to 2pm and then from 6pm until 10.30pm, so it was much harder to plan routes,” he recalls. Now, he says, it’s a doddle: WhatPub and Google Maps bring every pub up on a map, and a day can be planned in minutes. Hill tends not to do more than 12 pubs in a day, which translates to around six pints, because he has to be able to get up and do it all again the next morning. Last week he spent a week in Grimsby, determined to tick off the remaining 58 pubs on his list for that area. “It’s the nearest seaside town where I could knock a good number off the list,” he says. Even on family visits, the habit is hard to break. When he went to see his daughter in Essex, he promised her he wouldn’t turn the trip into a pub crawl—“but I managed to fit a couple in.” His wife sometimes comes along, but he has learned to be careful not to turn their trips and holidays into pub crawls; he will perhaps fit in one or two when she is about. The balance between a lifelong obsession and family life has not always been easy, but it has clearly been a happy one, and his family seem to accept that a man with 25,000 pubs on his list will never quite stop looking at a map for the next one. He has also learned to pace himself: a pub crawl is not a race, and the point is to enjoy the day, not to rush through it.
At home, one room is stacked with 300 arch-lever files, each one documenting a pub he has visited, complete with pictures, menus and other memorabilia. The records are painstakingly kept, and occasionally they reveal a surprise. Hill recalls drinking in a pub in Grimsby last week, only to realise when he checked his files that he had already been there before. The first time, he had filed it under Humberside; this time he filed it under Cleethorpes, and the two places border each other. The mistake forced him to drive to Worcester to find a new pub to reach 24,999 in time for his milestone day. Such is the strange, meticulous life of a man who has turned a love of beer into a mission. The 25,000th pub itself was exactly what he hoped it would be: a good atmosphere, good company and a welcoming landlord. He has met thousands of landlords and bar staff over the years, and while the faces blur, the feeling of being welcomed in does not. The files are more than a logbook; they are a diary of a life lived in the company of others, a record of the people he has met, the beers he has tried and the small moments that make up a long, happy journey. Even after all these years, he still gets a thrill from walking into a pub he has never visited before, not knowing what he will find on the other side of the door. There is a certain magic in that moment of anticipation, and it is what keeps him going from one county to the next.
The cost of such a quest is considerable, but Hill has never been in it for the money. Since 1984, he has asked for £1 for every pub visited and has raised around £36,000 for charity. Initially the money went to the air ambulance, and more recently to Wiltshire hospitals. He keeps a detailed record of everything he spends—diesel, accommodation, food and beer—so he knows exactly what the trips have cost him. Since 2019, that has been around £11,000 a year; in earlier, cheaper decades it was probably closer to £8,000, making an estimated total of £336,000. “I’m afraid to add it all up and even more afraid of the wife if I did,” he jokes. Sometimes a single trip to visit one far-flung pub can cost a few hundred pounds, so the true figure is hard to pin down. What is certain is that his travelling costs have far exceeded the amount raised. Yet the generosity of the people he has met along the way, and the knowledge that the money has helped good causes, matters as much as the pints. He has never asked for anything more than a pound, and even now, after 25,000 visits, he still asks. It is a small ritual, but it connects every pub on the list to something larger than a personal obsession. The money has bought medical equipment, supported hospitals and helped save lives. In that sense, the longest pub crawl in history is also one of the most generous.
At 70, Hill knows the longer distances are becoming more difficult, but he has no intention of stopping. “I’ll keep on going while I’m still fit and healthy enough,” he says. “I said I’ll keep going while I enjoy it and you can’t beat having a beer with your mates in the pub.” His favourite breweries remain Abbeydale and Oakham, and he still gets a kick from trying different beers in unfamiliar places. Recently the group has been to Essex, Grimsby and Yorkshire, and they still get about. He no longer needs to tick off entire guidebooks—he is happy to flit around the country, picking off areas where he can get through a decent number of pubs without travelling too far. But the 25,000th pub is not the end. It is just a milestone on a journey that has become part of who he is. Peter Hill has spent more than four decades proving that a pub is not just a building, but a meeting place, a warm refuge, a source of stories. His 25,000 visits have raised a glass to every kind of local: city-centre bars, village inns, riverside taverns and tiny island pubs. And if there is one thing he would want you to take from his story, it is that the best pub is often the one you haven’t found yet. So he will keep going, pint in hand, with his mates by his side, to see how many more there are to discover. The next pub is always out there, waiting, and Peter Hill intends to find it.
