Lloyds Tour of Britain Pub Crawl: Every Pub Within 100 m of the 2026 Route

The Tour de France gave us water taps and cafés. The Tour of Britain demands something more British. From Wednesday 2 to Sunday 6 September 2026, the Lloyds Tour of Britain Men races 910 km from Lincoln up to the Scottish Borders - so we loaded all five stage GPX files into PitStopper as one multi-route project and asked the only question that matters: how many pubs sit within 100 metres of the race line?

The answer: 171 pubs across the five stages. One every 5.3 kilometres, on average. But as ever, the average hides the story - one stage is a rolling pub crawl with a beer garden every couple of kilometres, and one is 160 km of beautiful Borders scenery with just four pubs on the whole route.

How we did it

PitStopper can hold several routes at once, so all five stage files went in together - each stage gets its own colour, and one search sweeps the lot. We set the search radius to a strict 100 metres, ticked only the Pubs category, and hit search. One pass later, every amenity=pub in OpenStreetMap within a stone's throw of the race was pinned to its stage, with the distance along the route and how far off the line it sits.

Stage 1: Lincoln - Lincoln (187.4 km, 26 pubs)

The race opens with a circuit race in miniature: out into the Wolds and back for finishing laps around Lincoln's cathedral quarter. The pub story here is all about those laps - the Magna Carta and Wig and Mitre sit at the top of the famous cobbled Michaelgate climb, and the peloton grinds past them again and again. PitStopper pins each pub to its nearest pass, which is why the same few streets show up at 135 km, 161 km and 174 km in the table below. Ride it yourself and you get three separate chances to give in.

One honest note from the data: OpenStreetMap lists two of the 26 - a White Hart and a Queens Head out in the villages - as closed. Community-maintained data tells you the sad truths too.

Stage 2: Boston - Skegness (184.9 km, 69 pubs)

The wettest stage of the race, in every sense. 69 pubs within 100 metres - one every 2.7 km - and they arrive in waves.

Boston fires the starting gun past eleven pubs in the first 1.5 km, including The Stump & Candle on the line and, a street later, The Moon Under Water - the name George Orwell gave his imaginary perfect pub. Louth stacks five more into 400 metres around the 107 km mark. Then comes the seaside: Mablethorpe and Sutton on Sea roll past beach bars and seafront hotels, and the Skegness finale is pure end-of-the-pier - eight pubs in the final 1.5 km, with The Jolly Fisherman (named after the town's famous mascot) just 17 metres off the race line and the Suncastle practically hosting the podium.

Stage 3: Hull - Beverley (200.3 km, 40 pubs)

The longest stage weighs in with 40 pubs, and the best cluster on the entire race: when the route touches the seafront at Hornsea, six pubs pass in 200 metres - The Commercial, The Old Boatshed, The Alexandra Hotel, The Butterfly, the Pier Hotel and The Spread Eagle, all between 33.8 and 34.0 km. The finishing circuits around Beverley and Walkington then do the Lincoln trick: The Barrel and The Dog and Duck get a first visit at 171.6 km and the same streets come back around before the Rose and Crown signs things off 1.4 km from the line.

Stage 4: Helmsley - Leyburn (170.3 km, 32 pubs)

The Yorkshire stage doesn't wait: the neutral start rolls out literally past the Royal Oak and The Pickwick Bar at 0.0 km, with the Helmsley Brewing Company taproom 100 metres later. From there it's a greatest-hits tour of northern pub country - the Byland Abbey Inn facing the abbey ruins at 11 km, a Boroughbridge-to-Ripon double cluster mid-race, Pateley Bridge at 69 km, and Kettlewell's Blue Bell Inn and The Racehorses side by side in Wharfedale at 97 km.

The finish is properly civilised too: the Black Swan Hotel and the Golden Lion both sit on Leyburn's market square at 170.3 km - which is to say, on the finish line.

Stage 5: Earlston - Earlston (160.4 km, 4 pubs)

And then Scotland happens. The Borders stage is magnificent riding - and a pub desert. Four pubs in 160 kilometres. Three of them come in one merciful burst in Duns at 47 km (the Horn Inn is just 7 metres off the race line - the closest pub to the wheels on the entire Tour), followed by a 75 km gap before The Swan in Earlston itself. If stage 2 is the crawl, stage 5 is the hangover: carry a flask.

The hygiene ratings come free

Here's the bit we didn't expect to be so useful. Because every pub is a food business, PitStopper automatically looks up the UK Food Standards Agency hygiene rating for pubs, cafés and restaurants along your route and shows it right in the POI popup - star rating, inspection date, and a link to the official record.

Both of our featured stops - The Jolly Fisherman and the Byland Abbey Inn - carry a 5: Very Good, so the mid-ride pie is officially sanctioned. (The Scottish Borders stage plays by different rules: Scotland runs its own pass/fail scheme rather than the 0-5 stars used in England and Wales.)

How does the map know a pub is closed?

Two of stage 1's pubs came back with a warning attached: a White Hart (Closed) and a Queens Head Closed) out in the Lincolnshire villages. That made us curious - does the data really track closures?

Sort of, and the mechanism is charmingly human. We pulled the raw OpenStreetMap records, and both are still tagged as ordinary pubs - but a local mapper has written "(Closed)" straight into the pub's name (complete with a missing bracket on the Queens Head - a typo now faithfully reproduced on maps everywhere). It's the digital equivalent of a hand-written sign taped to the door.

The proper OSM way to retire a pub is to re-tag it as disused:amenity=pub - at which point it stops being a pub as far as any search is concerned and vanishes from results entirely. So the closed pubs you can see are the in-between cases: gone as a business, not yet re-filed in the database. Treat a stray "closed" in a pub's name as the local mapping community tapping you on the shoulder before you sprint for a locked door.

What about the women's race? We wanted to run exactly the same numbers for the Lloyds Tour of Britain Women 2026 - but we haven't been able to track down the stage GPX files yet. The moment we find them, they're going in the map. Know where they live? Tell us.

A few caveats before you plan a session

These are OpenStreetMap pub counts within a strict 100 m corridor - a pub 110 m down a side street doesn't make the list, and OSM completeness varies. An amenity=pub tag doesn't promise it's open when a sweaty cyclist rolls up on race day (see the closed-pub note above). Counts are a snapshot from July 2026.

Every pub, stage by stage

The shape of the crawl in one picture:

Distances are along the route from the stage start; "off route" is how far the front door sits from the race line. Postcodes come straight from OpenStreetMap's address data (blank where nobody has mapped one yet).

Stage 1: Lincoln - Lincoln

Stage 2: Boston - Skegness

Stage 3: Hull - Beverley

Stage 4: Helmsley - Leyburn

Stage 5: Earlston - Earlston

Plan your own crawl (er, ride)

Everything here took one GPX upload and one search. Load any route into PitStopper, tick Pubs (it's in Food & Drink), set the radius to however thirsty you are, and every pub gets pinned to your line with its distance along the route, which side of the road it's on, and - in England and Wales - its official food hygiene rating. Export the lot to your bike computer and the mid-ride pint practically plans itself.

Header photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash. Pub data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Food hygiene ratings from the Food Standards Agency. Stage routes from the official Tour of Britain GPX files.