The unwritten rules of the great London pub quiz

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to London

It’s the end of a long Tuesday in the office. The pub seems surprisingly busy — little groups of unusually attentive punters are hunched over sheets of paper at their table, deep in thought. Someone is tapping impatiently on a microphone. Congratulations, you’ve stumbled upon a pub quiz — a very British way of unwinding, in which you’ll compete with strangers over several dozen time-pressured, general-knowledge questions delivered by a between-gigs graduate in the post-industrial stylings of what now passes for a pub.

Too right. If you’re going to be in the pub anyway on a Tuesday night (and you won’t find as many quizzes later in the week, as establishments fill up of their own accord), you might as well try to pay for your drinks with general knowledge. At its most basic, the pub quiz consists of several rounds of trivia questions, with a cash prize or bar tab for whichever team scores least badly.

Be warned, though, the British pub quiz is an institution, and like many well-loved institutions can descend into a quagmire of unwritten rules, traditions and biases to bog down the unwary. It can range from fiendish to downright farcical, with all manner of house rules and curveballs along the way.

After all, the pub quiz speaks to much of modern Britain: knowledge-based grandstanding, quibbling over minor rules and all manner of alcohol-induced incompetence. The precise history of the phenomenon is hazy, but quizzes became popular in the 1970s after a company called Burns & Porter began putting the “organised” in “organised fun” in venues across the country. Today, there are over 500 regular quizzes in the city — hell, even FT Alphaville has one.

If you’ve ever accidentally been caught up in one while partaking in what you thought would be a quiet midweek pint, it might not have left the best first impression. But as windows into British culture go, the pub quiz is about as distilled as it gets. So, for the uninitiated, before you set out on the road to trivial triumph, here’s what you need to know.

The team

First things first, you’ll need to assemble a team. There’s a lot of curriculum to cover, so you’ll want friends or colleagues who can tackle the inevitable and impenetrable: British soaps; Ed Sheeran’s early discography; mid-20th-century rugby personalities. Pick the kind of team that can save you hours of dismal revision and answer these for you. Choose wisely, though, as some venues will deduct points for teams above, say, six or seven people — apart from anything, you don’t want to end up being the sprawling table of 12 that doesn’t even place.

At a minimum, you’ll want: someone to cover the kind of pop and celebrity culture that tends to elude the pages of FT Weekend; someone who’s watched altogether too much late-night Eurosport and knows the difference between leg gully and silly mid-off; someone whose geographical and historical awareness can place the Ottoman Empire on both a map and a timeline; and, for good measure, someone whose bookshelves see more use than solely as a Zoom background.

Try to intersect all of this with people you actually enjoy spending time with, obviously — imagine you’re planning a dinner party, only there’s a very loud guest who keeps interrupting to ask you about London Underground lines and Bob Dylan songs. (That sounds quite a lot like most London dinner parties.) And try to include someone who can write at least half-legibly, too. Snatch the pen off your doctor friend if you see them reaching for it.

You also need to come up with a team name, ideally not three questions before the end of proceedings. Don’t spend too much time on it, as it will be garbled by the host and rarely succeed in making anyone laugh but those on your team. As far as profanity, obscenity and blasphemy are concerned, almost anything goes; the best names usually result from forcing the quizmaster to say something unspeakably insensitive. For the love of originality, just don’t make it a pun on the word “quiz”. Let’s Get Quizzical, Quiztina Aguilera, Quiz in Your Pants — no, no, no.

Right, everyone here? Go and get yourself a drink.

The format

The quizmaster, always either gratingly hyperactive or Eeyore-gloomy, should eventually make their way over to your table. Pay them a £1 to £3 entrance fee per person and not a penny more, and they will give you an answer sheet (there are also, I’m told, app-based pub quizzes; the less said about those the better). Take some time to peruse the themes of the four to eight rounds if they’re listed, because some of them you may need to fill out before the quiz proper begins.

The perennial picture round, for example. Some of these could be entire quizzes in themselves and may force you to sacrifice one of your team to a quiet written exam in the corner or risk losing half the points available. Its remit will vary: sometimes the ability to name Elmo or Liz Truss will prove sufficient; other questions may feel like fever dreams of non-verbal reasoning and corporate-logo identification. Some venues will even ask you to draw things or sculpt them from playdough, so think twice before front-loading your team with people who can recall every 20th-century prime minister or the atomic number for caesium, but artistically can’t think beyond a stickman.

There will undoubtedly be a music round, and you will do less well than you think. Spotify Wrapped might have assured you that your taste is eclectic and wide-ranging, but good luck identifying whatever Alanis Morissette B-side or Backstreet Boys back-catalogue travesty your host has scraped from a childhood mixtape for you to identify. Expect a pop-heavy selection, with one track per decade, starting in the 1950s or 1960s and ending in the uncharted waters of the 2020s. If you had the misfortune to be born after the Berlin Wall came down, guessing the name and artist of whatever mid-chart mediocrity is exhumed from the 1980s is time you might as well spend queueing at the bar.

A brief word on themed quizzes: yes, there are evenings centred purely around, say, Seinfeld or Peep Show, but make sure you’re genuinely obsessed with the subject rather than just keen, or you’ll end up like my friend who attended a Marvel Cinematic Universe-themed quiz and had to answer questions about which Avengers film had the shortest running time. They came second last, and only because the bottom team had the humility to leave halfway through.

The etiquette

Capital punishment was abolished in the UK in 1969, but the law is willing to make exceptions for those who cheat in pub quizzes. For this reason, people rarely do. You are encouraged to bury your phone in your deepest pocket to avoid the accusatory glances of those around you when you inadvertently start scrolling through X during a round on the royal family. God forbid you do what one friend did and pull out your work laptop to handle some emails mid-quiz — never has an expression changed from fancy-free to furious as quickly as it did on the face of the hyper-competitive American woman at the next table.

Take the moral high ground, and be generous when the time comes to swap sheets and mark your competitors’ work. There is no glory to be had in winning after marking someone down for forgetting the accent on “Beyoncé”, nor in taking advantage of any unwarranted points that result from their inability to add up your score properly.

The reward

Should your team make it through the evening without strangling each other, your host or your competitors, you may just find you’re in the running for a prize. First place often bags several tens of pounds worth of bar tab, and it is legally required that you drink all of it in the half-hour between the end of the quiz and last orders. Some venues offer real money instead, but it all seems to amount to drinks money in the end.

If, despite all this intel, you don’t come top, fear not — there are often prizes further down the standings. I’ve seen bags of crisps, genuine wooden spoons and tat raided (on an alarmingly consistent basis) from local retailers’ bins. There may even be follow-up rounds, either as tiebreakers or just to extend the quizmaster’s reign of terror a little longer. I once watched despairingly as one venue set up a football goal and asked a contestant to score against another wearing a crab costume. Who said Tuesday evenings were dead?

Where to go

The following suggestions are just a drop in a very competitive ocean, guaranteed to annoy both the regulars who don’t want their winning streak ruined and those aggrieved that their infinitely superior local didn’t get a mention. Really, what you ought to do is go to your closest venue and then never return when you don’t win. Or, for a more comprehensive list, try Alan Evans’s regularly updated interactive map — just be sure to check with the pub in advance that the quiz is running.

The Southwark Tavern (London Bridge)
The City of London isn’t exactly overflowing with quizzes, but just across the river from the FT is this atmospheric haunt on the edge of Borough Market. It claims to be a former debtors’ prison — certainly what look like old cells now make for cosy nooks around the downstairs bar, where the weekly quiz takes place. Tuesday from 8pm. Website; Directions

Skehan’s (Nunhead)
This beloved independent pub also hosts an endearingly run quiz, complete with “higher or lower” card game for selected teams. Expect fierce competition in the form of teams of skint Goldsmiths students, whose campus is nearby. Thursday from 8.30pm. Website; Directions

The Grapes (Limehouse)
This Thameside pub has existed in different forms for almost five centuries, including in a thinly veiled reference in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Along with a complete set of the author’s works, it hosts a quiz occasionally attended by actor and co-leaseholder Ian McKellen. Monday from 8pm. Website; Directions

The Lexington (Islington)
If the music round never quite feels long enough, why not make a whole quiz of it? This north London boozer doesn’t just host great live music, it also hands the reins over to one Paul Guided Missile every Monday for a fiendish and keyboard-inflected pop quiz. Monday from 8pm. Website; Directions

The Cross Keys (Hammersmith)
A hidden gem of a pub in an area not short of good drinking spots. The weekly quiz, apparently beloved of TV presenter James May, is one to bring your literary ace for, courtesy of a round focusing on a different book each week. Thursdays from 8.15pm. Website; Directions

Tell us about your favourite London pub quiz in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter