How we check
Three labels appear on places across this site. They are not marketing tiers. They describe exactly how far we have gone to confirm what we are telling you, and one of them says plainly that we have not confirmed it at all.
Beaches are checked against the council order itself
We read the local authority’s own public spaces protection order or byelaw, not a summary of it and not another website. We link to the source and we show the date we read it. Councils have to revise these orders at least every three years, so we go back and check again.
Some places we have confirmed directly
We mark a pub or cafe as checked when we have rung them and asked, when the venue has claimed its own listing and confirmed the policy, or when enough dog owners have told us the same thing. The date on the label is the date of that check.
Most pubs and cafes start as a listing, and we say so
Our pub and cafe listings come from public sources, and those sources record only that a venue allows dogs. They do not tell you whether that means inside by the fire or tied up outside in the rain, and in November that is the only distinction that counts. So we label them as what they are, and we ask you to tell us what you found.
What we will not do
We will not print a penalty figure for a council that has not published one. Some authorities let their dog orders lapse and never renewed them, and at least one publishes a page of consultation text from 2018 with no order behind it. Where that is the case we say the order could not be found, rather than inventing a number that looks authoritative.
We also will not describe a lead requirement as a ban, or a ban as a lead requirement. Where a beach allows dogs but only on a lead between set hours, that is what the page says, with the hours.
If something here is wrong, tell us
Rules change, pubs change hands, and a beach that was open last summer may not be this one. There is a one-tap control on every venue page asking whether your dog was allowed inside. It takes two seconds and it is the single most useful thing you can tell us.
We would rather be corrected than trusted by accident.