Oxford CAMRA:
Pubs Database Launched

28th September 2006

The Oxford City branch of CAMRA covers a large area - much larger than the name "Oxford City" would tend to suggest. It is often unclear to people (even those of us who are active branch members!) whether particular pubs are the responsibility of the Oxford branch or one of the other Oxfordshire branches of the campaign: North Oxfordshire, South Oxfordshire or Vale of the White Horse.

There are about 320 pubs and bars in the branch area, and some 140 of those are outside Oxford. With only 15 or 20 activists within the branch who attend meetings and social events, most of whom are Oxford-based, you will appreciate that we are spread pretty thin when it comes to surveying pubs for the Good Beer Guide, choosing a branch pub of the year award, fighting pub closure campaigns, or just staying up to date with general pub news.

A new Pubs Database was added to the Oxford branch web site in September. The first aim of this project is to put online a definitive list of all the pubs and bars in the branch area, including all the contact details that we have for them. Using the pub lists that searching the database can provide, it is now easy for everyone to see which towns and villages we aim to cover and to figure out which pubs fall in the branch area. Although the database does not (yet) give much information on each individual pub, we hope that even in its current form it is a useful resource for branch members and the general public. It can be used to find all the pubs in a particular town/village, or all the pubs in a particular postcode prefix (useful for planning crawls!). It also contains a number of aliases and old names for pubs, which might be helpful (for example: Looking for a pub in Jericho called the Prince of Wales? It is the pub on Walton St that we now call Jude the Obscure).

Our next big hope is that we can use the Database as a tool to gather news, views, and information about pubs from a much wider circle of people. Anyone can go to the web site, find a particular pub in the database, then click on the "Send a comment" link to send us a short note about that pub. We would very much like everybody with an interest in pubs, CAMRA members, publicans and members of the public, to keep us informed about what is going on with pubs across the area. We want which pubs you think are good (or bad!), which places serve the best pint (or a dreadful one!), when a pub gets an interesting new beer, when the publican changes. We would also like to hear from anyone if they think that the information in the database is outdated or incorrect. Have any of the pubs closed? Changed names? Have we accidently missed any of the pubs in our area off the list? The more information we get the better we can make the Oxford Drinker, the better we can make the branch web site, the better we can select for the Good Beer Guide, and the more effectively we can campaign on behalf of real ale and real pubs in the local area.

Several people have already asked me whether we intend to add more information to the database. Personally, I would very much like to include more details for each pub: opening times, beers served, pub descriptions, available facilities, photos, etc. In an ideal world we would turn the database into something resembling an online pub guide for the whole area. However, having helped to survey for pub guides in the past, I am conscious that this involves a very large amount of work. Worse, "guide" type information is only really useful if it is updated regularly. The viability of a richer, more featureful database in large part depends whether or not pub-goers and publicans across the area can feed us enough information to make it worthwhile. Over to you, folks ...