80% of people driven out of pubs, restaurants, cafés by noise, new study shows.

A new study shows that 80% of people have cut short their visit to a pub, café or restaurant because of noise, while 75% say they would eat out more often if places were quieter. The new survey comes from Action on Hearing Loss (formerly the RNID). In 2016 AHL urged restaurants to turn the music down – and the lighting levels up – to create a better environment for people with hearing problems, who make up some 15% of the population. About 30% of the population is unusually sensitive to background noise without necessarily having hearing problems. As a result of this survey, Mumbli, a company that ranks venues on their acoustic quality, is to launch a campaign to develop ‘Michelin star style’ system to rate the ‘sound aura’ of venues across the UK. The new system combines acoustics, reverberation time and other data to mark London’s venues. So far they have measured noise in about 300 places, mostly around Shoreditch in east London. They aim to measure another 1,000 places in London and the UK in 2020.

The survey reinforces the point that piped music, a major contributor to noise in pubs etc, repels rather than attracts customers. Hence the success of Wetherspoons and Sam Smiths pubs, both of which shun piped music.

(This entry, which was posted before the closure of all pubs, restaurants etc on 20th March, may lack relevance now. But when pubs along with everything else finally reopen, it will be as pertinent as ever.)