The book was published in 1979, while the TV series was aired in early 1981. At the time, the average price of a pint of bitter would have been 34p (1979) resp. 49p (1981).
1980s pub prices 🍻 I remember a pint of lager in 1983 cost 75p. You could go to the pub with 3 quid and buy 4 pints with it. I remember buying a pint of bitter for 40p, then it started creeping up, 42p.....
Beer was 16p a pint in 1971. Courage Tavern cost between 14p and 18p for a pint in 1972. Whisky was more expensive in the 1970s than today (allowing for inflation).
The entry cost to Koko (FKA Camden Palace) was £6 in the '90s, equivalent to £12.50 today. Today its median ticket price is £29.50, an increase of 136 percent. Back in the day a pint would set you back £1.60, worth £4 now. Today the average London pint cost has risen by 63 percent, costing £6.50.
As of July 2025, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK is approximately £5.17. That's up by around 21 pence compared to earlier in the year, and the first time the average exceeded the £5 mark.
You could no longer get three pints for a pound. The music bars we went to charged more. The Nashville Rooms in West Kensington charged 40p for a light and bitter and 50p for a Guinness. Soon enough, by the spring of 1980, this was the price of beer at non-music venues.
A pint of beer, costing an average of pounds 1.65 now, was only 7p (or 1s/4d ) in 1947, and a pound of potatoes that cost 23 pence in June 1997 would have been 0.5p (or 1d) half a century earlier.
1912 saw Suffragettes protesting on the streets of London, a national miners strike and the sinking of RMS Titanic. The price of beer in the Potteries was around 3d a pint in old money.
From the Brian Mills Spring/Summer 1983 mail order catalogue - priced from just under £200 to just under £450, microwave ovens were not cheap by early 1980s standards. "High speed cooking" proclaims Brian Mills.
How much is a loaf of bread? In 2000, you could pick up a whopping 19 800g loaves of white bread with a tenner and have some change to spare; that's a lot of sandwiches. Fast forward to 2017 and the price of a white loaf has almost doubled from a bargain 52p to £1.
BACK in May, 1979, motorist Jack Cooper was toasting 21 years of driving his vintage Austin A35. Mr Cooper bought the car from the Bee Hive Garage, Horwich, in March 1958 and paid £630 when that was equal to a third of the price of an average house.
In 1995, you could head to the shops and purchase a packet of 20 king-size cigarettes for just £2.59. Smokers were then hit hard 5 years later in 2000, as prices increased by £1.36 which made a 20-pack's new price £3.59.
