The hospitality industry in the United Kingdom is largely represented by the country's hotels, pubs, restaurants and leisure companies, and produces around 4% of UK GDP.
There are over 207,000 eating venues in England, and around 25% of these are fast-food outlets.
According to the British Beer and Pub Association, around 8.5 billion pints of beer were sold, with 7.4 billion 175ml glasses of wine, and 1.2 billion pints of cider in the UK in 2018. Beer has 54 pence of duty per pint. There are around 2530 breweries in the UK.
In 2022 the hospitality industry was the 3rd biggest employer in the UK, accounting for 3.5m jobs through direct employment, and a further 3.0m indirectly.[1]
In 2022 the UK hospitality industry paid around £54bn in tax receipts.[1]
The National Skills Academy for Food & Drink (NSAFD) is at York.[4] The Institute of Hospitality was known as HCIMA - Hotel and Catering International Management Association, which became the IoH in April 2007. The Hotel and Catering Institute was founded in 1949; the professional body merged with the Institutional Management Association in 1971. Hotel, Restaurant & Catering (HRC) is a main national event.
Greene King and Mitchells & Butlers are two of the biggest apprenticeship providers in the UK, with around 1,500 each; only the armed forces, BT and HMRC have more numbers of apprenticeships.
Victor Ceserani MBE pioneered catering education in the UK, when he was head of catering at Ealing College, now part of University of West London; this had been Acton Hotel and Catering School until 1957 and trained many airline catering staff; he wrote The Theory of Catering and Practical Cookery, with Ronald Kinton and David Foskett (academic).
The University of Strathclyde had the Scottish Hotel School in the late 1960s. Strathclyde and the University of Surrey were the first two universities in UK to have hotel and catering management courses, both at the same time. The University of Surrey moved to its present site in 1968 and was the first in the UK to offer a course for hotel and catering: a BSc in hotel and catering management, with a 48-week professional year starting in the March of the second year; the course was led by Brian Archer from 1978. Another important place for catering was the Dorset Institute of Higher Education, since 1992 being known as Bournemouth University.[7]
The 1,019-room Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel in April 2011; it is owned by PPHE Hotel Group, and next to the Thames in Lambeth
The 39-storey Novotel London Canary Wharf (40 Marsh Wall) is the tallest purpose-built hotel in the UK, at 419 feet; it is the tallest Novotel hotel (owned by Accor); it opened in April 2017; it has beehives on the 39th floor, which produce fresh honey for guests; Novotel has thirty three hotels in the UK. The world's tallest hotel is the 356m Gevora Hotel, built in 2017.
The UK hotel industry is worth £16bn. Travelodge has 595 hotels with 11 in Ireland, with around 12,000 employees, and in 2022 it turned over around £910m. Premier Inn has about 850 hotels, with 83,500 rooms, and a revenue of £2.5bn.
Amanda Willmott had founded two pubs in Birmingham - Carpe Diem and Quo Vadis; this design formed the template for her new design of female-friendly pubs for Bass Inns, known as All Bar One, in February 1994, which first opened in December 1994 in Sutton, London; she went on to form a similar chain Ha! Ha! Bar and Canteen, in 1998.
Eating out
Beefeater Steak Houses were one of the first chains of restaurants, first opening in July 1974 in Enfield, London; in 1974 its most popular meal was prawn cocktail, rump steak, followed by Black Forest gateau and two glasses of LiebfraumilchGerman wine; by 1995 it was Britain's largest restaurant chain, with 270 outlets, serving 15 million people per year.[8]
The 1990 Food Safety Act was the biggest change since 1938. It was introduced due to rising cases in listeria in cooked chilled chicken products. It replaced the Food Act 1984. Prisons, civil service buildings and military bases would now have their kitchens inspected by local environmental health officers, which had not regularly happened before. There had been recent salmonella outbreaks in NHS hospitals. All food outlets would now have to be registered with local authorities. Environmental health officers could instantly close down restaurants, without needing to obtain a court order. Restaurant owners could be fined £20,000 and jailed for six months by local magistrates.[9]
The Food Safety (General Food Hygiene) Regulations 1995 were introduced on 15 September 1995, which implemented the European Food Hygiene Directive 93/43/EEC.
The Food Information Regulations 2014 brought in the necessity for businesses to display the 14 allergens. This originated from the European FIC Regulation of December 2014, the Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011.
Between 12-17 March 1984, British Airways had a salmonella outbreak on long-haul flights to North America, the Middle East, and East Africa, affecting 631 passengers and 135 staff on 14 flights, including the businessman Peter de Savary, giving him a week in hospital, and on Concorde flights. No flight deck staff were affected, as the pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer, by common practice, never had the same food as passengers. After the earlier Japan Air Lines food poisoning incident, in February 1975, the 52 year old catering manager of Inflight Catering Company, at Anchorage, had committed suicide.[10] Most onboard the 1975 flight were Japanese Coca-Cola salesmen and their wives, who were being rewarded by their company with a visit to France.[11] At the stopover at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, ham and cheese omelettes had been brought onboard for breakfast, which made 196 passengers ill, on the flight from Tokyo to France. This 1975 incident is the reason why airline pilots and co-pilots do not eat the same food as the passengers.[12][13] Prof Stanley Mohlers and Kenneth N. Beers of Wright State University Medical School in Dayton, Ohio believed that food poisoning was an untrivial risk for airline crew[14]
19 January 1991, at a McDonald's restaurant on Friar Gate in Preston in Lancashire,[15][16] 14 people contracted E. coli O157. This strain produced verocytotoxin,[17] so on 15 February 1991, McDonald's announced that it would cook its burgers for longer, across the whole of the UK[18]
December 2012, a Christmas meal at the Railway Hotel in Hornchurch made 33 people ill with Clostridium perfringens, and mother-of-one Della Callagher died two days later.[19] She had visited the Queen's Hospital in Romford, on Boxing Day, being given an anti-sickness injection by paramedics in an ambulance, and told to go home. No blood tests had been taken. She went into cardiac arrest the following morning, with CPR given, but the London Ambulance Service took 45 minutes to arrive.[20] The turkey meat, prepared the day before, was not cooled enough, after being cooked, and was not adequately reheated. Food safety records had not been adequately kept, so the 37-year-old pub chef and 41-year-old manager concocted records, and were jailed at Snaresbrook Court for 12 months and 18 months, in January 2015.[21] Mitchells & Butlers were fined £1.5m in November 2014; it was an Ember Inns establishment.[22]
Companies
Stonegate Pub Company
The Stonegate Pub Company (based close to the M1 in Luton) is the largest pub group in the UK, after it bought Ei Group in March 2020 for £3 billion.
Since 1982 the McDonald's UK headquarters are north of East Finchley tube station, being officially opened by Mrs Thatcher on 6 May 1983, when she was the local MP, and she also opened the £20m extension on 21 April 1989
McDonald's arrived in the UK on Powis Street in Woolwich on 1 October 1974, the 3,000th restaurant in the company's history; in December 1971 a McDonald's had opened in Obergiesing in southern Germany. Fred L. Turner attended the opening. Seven other restaurants followed in London, from January 1975 with Golders Green, Baker Street and Finchley Road.[24][25] A cheeseburger was 21p, and a Big Mac 45p; the Big Mac had been introduced in 1968. The restaurant was not, apparently, well-visited, so the company chose to heavily-advertise its products at less-discerning children.
In 1990 meat products were made in Milton Keynes, built in 1980, and Scunthorpe, built in 1989, with fruit pies made in the north of Huntingdon and doughnuts in Orton Southgate, owned by OSI Group, and salads made on the former RAF Methwold in south-west Norfolk (closed in 2006), and chicken products made by Avara Foods (run with Faccenda Foods) in Hereford.[26]
Burger King
Burger King arrived on 11 October 1977 on Coventry Street in London.[27] The second opened on 4 September 1979 on Victoria Street. The first Burger King outside of London opened in December 1980 at the Arndale Centre in Luton, now called Luton Point.[28] The third in the UK opened on 2 February 1981 on Queensway, London. The British restaurants were directly owned by Pillsbury.[29] By May 1983, it had nine British restaurants; McDonald's had 130,[30] and KFC had 350.[31]
KFC
The first KFC in the UK opened in Preston in August 1965. Another opened soon after at 78 County Road, in Walton, Liverpool. Many of these new outlets were largely franchises, which operated in ways of restrictive trade that could contravene the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956, and be investigated by the Office of Fair Trading.[32] David Acheson was head of KFC in the late 1970s. In 1971 KFC had been bought by Heublein, who owned Smirnoff vodka. By the end of 1972, there were 162 in the UK, with 90 in London.[33]
Pizza Hut
Pizza Hut came to the UK in Islington in 1973, being owned jointly by PepsiCo and Whitbread. By October 1983 it had 28 restaurants.[34]
Workforce
In 2015 the UK hospitality industry employed around 2.9m people – around 9% of the UK workforce. By employment, it is the UK's fourth-largest industry. The most jobs in the industry are found in London (around 500,000) and South East England (around 400,000); 18% of workers in the UK industry are in London. There are around 1.5m restaurant workers, and around 0.5m work in hotels.
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