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Bark & Borough

How we verify

Anyone can publish a list of dog-friendly pubs. The difficulty is that dog policies are unwritten, change without notice, and are frequently reported second-hand by people who visited once. This page sets out what we do about that, so you can decide how much to trust any given entry.

Every claim carries its source

We do not publish a dog policy unless we can link to the page we read it on and quote the words. Both appear on the venue’s entry, along with the date we checked. If you think we have it wrong, you can go and look at the same page we did.

Sources are ranked, and the ranking is visible

Tier 1 — the venue’s own words
Their website, FAQ, or an official social account. The strongest evidence available short of asking them directly.
Tier 2 — the authority that governs the land
Borough councils and their Public Spaces Protection Orders, the Royal Parks, the City of London Corporation, the Canal & River Trust, the National Trust. This is how walk rules are sourced.
Tier 3 — a reputable edited guide
A named publisher with editorial standards. Usable, and marked as third-party so you know the venue itself has not confirmed it.
Tier 4 — aggregators and directories
Structured but unverified. Used sparingly.
Tier 5 — reviews, forums, individual blogs
Never sufficient on its own to call a venue dog-friendly. It can raise doubt but never settle a question.

“Assistance dogs welcome” is not dog-friendliness

Admitting assistance dogs is a duty under the Equality Act 2010. It is the legal minimum, not a welcome, and it tells you nothing about whether your dog can come in. Where a venue states only this, we record it as assistance dogs only and never list it as dog-friendly — no matter how many guides do.

Inside and outside are different questions

A great deal of “dog-friendly” in London means the pavement tables. That is a useful thing to know in July and a useless one in January, so we record indoor access, outdoor access, the bar area and the dining area separately, and we let you filter on them.

Where the venue disagrees with the guide, the venue wins

We re-check listings against the venue’s own website. In this dataset that changed five entries — in each case the venue’s own policy was morerestrictive than a published guide claimed. Those are exactly the cases that get someone turned away at the door, so the venue’s wording replaces the guide’s.

Off-lead rules are treated as legal facts

Public Spaces Protection Orders are enforceable, carry fixed-penalty notices, differ between adjacent boroughs, and are renewed on cycles that change the rules quietly. We take off-lead status only from the body that sets it, and quote it.

Where we could not obtain an official source, the walk is marked unverified rather than guessed. 10 of our 50 walks currently carry that mark. Some of those are cases where the council’s own website blocks automated access, and some are genuinely contradictory — Alexandra Park, for instance, has 1929 Trust byelaws requiring a lead and a borough order permitting off-lead in large parks. We would rather tell you that than pick one.

When a venue closes, changes hands or is renamed

A directory’s most common silent failure is not a wrong policy — it is a correct policy about a business that no longer exists. A closure is treated as a claim like any other and needs evidence: dated local press, the successor trading at the same address, a dead domain, or the venue’s own announcement.

Once established, the record is retired rather than edited. It leaves the site, but it is kept with the evidence for the closure attached, so the history of why a listing disappeared is auditable rather than lost. If a successor business trades at the same address, it is added as a new record with its dog policy unconfirmed— inheriting the previous occupant’s policy would be exactly the kind of plausible guess this standard exists to prevent.

This is not theoretical. One venue in this dataset was listed as a dog-friendly Clapham pub on a third-party guide’s say-so; it had closed five years earlier and the site now trades under a different name, which publishes no dog policy at all. It has been retired and its successor recorded as unconfirmed.

How a correction is handled

Anyone can report an error, and you do not have to identify yourself to do it — the email field on the form is optional and a correction is just as useful without one.

  1. We go back to the source, not to the person reporting. A correction is a prompt to re-read the venue’s page, not evidence in itself.
  2. Evidence is replaced, never edited. If the policy has changed, we quote the new wording and re-date it. We do not tidy a quote, paraphrase it, or fix its capitalisation — where a source shouts in capitals, so do we.
  3. If we cannot re-confirm, the venue is downgraded to unconfirmed and leaves the public lists, rather than staying up with a note attached.
  4. A venue’s own report outranks everything. If you work there and tell us dogs are no longer welcome, that is tier-1 evidence and we act on it immediately. The reverse — telling us dogs are welcome — we will happily record, but we will ask you to publish it somewhere we can link to, because the whole point is that a reader can check it without taking our word or yours.

What we refuse to do

What this dataset currently is

Where we are weakest

Stating this openly is part of the standard. Several large pub groups block automated access to their own dog-policy pages, so venues in those groups are under-represented here relative to how dog-friendly they actually are. Some borough councils publish their orders only as scanned PDFs. And a policy confirmed today can change tomorrow without anyone announcing it — which is why the date is on every entry.

Citing this standard

If you are writing about dog access in London and want to describe how these figures were produced, this page is the reference — link to it rather than paraphrasing, because the method will change over time and a link stays accurate. The aggregate figures, with their caveats, are on the data summary.

Venues whose policy we have quoted from their own words may display the Dog Policy Verified badge. It is a citation, not a certification, and that distinction is set out on that page.

Found something wrong? Tell us.