Sunderland's ranking in the UK's 'best night out' list and the 'reasons' for it

It’s compiled by a training provider called Get Licensed (no, me neither). They state on their website that they “want to finally settle the argument over the best city in the UK for its nightlife”, before proceeding to do no such thing.

Sunderland makes the top 30, finishing 24th. How good is that? We aren’t sure as Get Licensed don’t say how many places they examined in total. We’ve no idea who was at 31 downwards.

Criteria

Some of the criteria are bizarre. Drinks price seems a reasonable consideration but, for some reason, having hordes of bars, regardless of quality, raises the score.

Safety is a seemingly paramount determinant; but guided by the Numbeo safety index score. As Numbeo is also the organisation which decrees Beirut to be safer than Dublin, do with their scores as you will.

Sunderland scores a moderate Numbeo 54, compared with London’s 46 and Preston’s 33. Yet Preston has never struck us as being especially woolly.

There are three other safety categories incorporating muggings, robbery, hate crime and walking alone. But they all concern levels of “worry” or “feeling safe”. Actual crime figures have failed to interest the compilers.

The entire “Best Night Out” enterprise is non-empirical. It deals with analysis, surveys and statistics. Actually visiting places and judging their whooping-it-up merits for themselves has no place in Get Licensed’s “findings”.

Newcastle finishes top, whereas Glasgow and Liverpool, both of which offer (in our humble opinion) a significantly more enjoyable night out than Newcastle, are 27th and 30th respectively.

We could say this is an adumbrated list; but even some “facts” are dubious. Wigan is named “top place in Britain for a drink” partly because a pint costs an average £2.56. Is this correct? In Sunderland it’s £3.98.

What does ring true is the stated average price in York and Edinburgh. These cities are listed second and fifth on the list, suggesting they are among Britain’s finest cities. Indeed they are.

But they both charge an outrageous £5.68 per pint, which also places them among Britain’s greediest.

The guide puts Newcastle’s total number of CAMRA pubs at 211 per 100,000 people, which would mean the total number of these establishments in the city is around 630. In fact there are 18. Sunderland has 14.

The worst?

Your author is a regular visitor to the capital. So vast is London, visitors may have whichever type of evening they desire. I’ve had some corkers there.

Yet it’s “dubbed the worst night out in the UK” according to this list. Really? We can reasonably compare, say, Leeds (16th) with Manchester (nowhere). But comparing London with any other UK city is like comparing chips with Tuesday.

The “second worst night out” is in Coventry, an interpretation which could prove hugely controversial; although probably not (and yes, I’ve had a few nights out there). Not all of the conclusions are off-the-wall.

The real conclusion

The listings infer that Sunderland offers a decent night out, without meriting a tourist invasion. We disagree and posit that it offers the greatest night out on Earth. Our conclusion is based on a “We say so” approach to our findings. And why not?

We didn’t start it.