Southampton-pubs is a listing website. It contains an alphabetical listing of pubs, a map which only shows "featured pubs" (those which have paid a fee - which is only 15 of the approx 175 pubs in Southampton). There is a search facility where you can put in "real ale" or "food" and get a list of pubs which associate with that term - but only the 15 featured pubs turn up, so it's fairly limited. There are no reviews, except for a very few of the featured pubs.
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Southampton University Blog Post
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April 2017 student post about a random selection of bars and pubs in Southampton. Not very helpful.
Provides an alphabetical list of pubs grouped by area - Woolston, Bitterne, Shirley, etc. There's some basic info, including a map, and most have a photo. People can leave reviews, but few pubs are reviewed. There's about 65 pubs on the site, with seven reviewed.
Reviews by reporters, which are informative, but not critical, so feel more like adverts. There are approx 50 pubs reviewed from in and around Southampton, including in Winchester and Romsey.
CAMRA's guide, written by local CAMRA members with an attempt to be neutral and factual. This is probably the most useful pub guide available on the internet. It makes a genuine attempt to list and review every pub, and presents a range of useful information regarding the food, beer and facilities offered. There are images and maps, and various search functions including by postcode or location, and filter by cask ale (called "real ale" by CAMRA) or real fire or food, or several other features.
A blog which, as I am doing, surveyed the pubs in Southampton. Gary did it three times - 2007, 2008, and 2013, but the 2008 survey appears to be no longer available. I like the personal aspect of it, and that for the 2013 guide, it is a blog account rather than a list of details and reviews, so it is very warm, accessible, and inviting. It is also very useful as a record of what the pubs were like in those years.
BITE was the first major national pub rating site to attract a significant number of reviewers. It started as a London based site created by actual pub goers who knew what other pub goers wanted. It offered the means to create your own pub crawls, and when it launched as a national public site, you could have a beerintheevening email address which simply forwarded to your own email, which was a neat idea. It was vibrant and exciting, and created a community who could communicate with each other via an internal message system, and members would meet up. The site was then sold to a businessman who didn't quite understand the community. He appeared well intentioned, and initially created a forum for members to communicate, but as the site increasingly failed to respond to members needs the forum became more and more hostile towards the owner until the owner closed the forum down. Most of the active members then left en masse to another pub rating site - Pubs Galore, and BITE never recovered. It was sold on again, but reviews have largely dried up. I didn't leave with the others to join the alternative site as I felt I had too many reviews to move. I check out Pubs Galore now and again, but it has not yet caught up with the position BITE was in when the membership left, and so neither site benefited from the split. I still contribute to BITE, but not as regularly as I used to.
This is the site to which a bunch of the active rating crowd of BITE went to. The quality of the reviews is high, though there are not enough of them, and some reviews are quite old.
Gives fairly sparse and random historical details about old pubs, usually just names of previous landlords, but can give some indication of how old a pub is.
A business directory and review site, which was
formed in 2004. I've only just become aware of it, though the owners claim to have over
184 million reviews as of June 2019. Contains useful information, but the reviews are random and few in number. I looked at
The Dancing Man, as it's the highest rated on the site, and it has had 10 reviews since the first in 2015. The most recent is Nov 2018. Compare that with
Trip Advisor, which has 753 reviews since 2015, with the most recent today.
Blog review of a fairly random (and poorly chosen) selection of pubs mostly in the town centre, done in January 2019. It's a modest post by a reputable and popular beer blog.
Probably the most popular and successful online review site. Unfortunately it doesn't specifically do pubs, so they will get listed under restaurants, and the focus will be on the food. However, it's coverage is impressive, and no site gets as many reviews. Used in conjunction with WhatPub you can generally get a good idea if its the sort of pub you'll enjoy.
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