London’s most equidistant pub

I built this. I expected to find the pub everyone in London could reach within an hour. There isn't one.

Nothing clears 65 minutes either. The first pubs all 33 boroughs can reach turn up at 70 minutes, and there are exactly two of them, less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street.

The maths has no opinion on beer. The winner is a Greene King, number four is a Wetherspoon above Baker Street station, and number three is an alcohol-free brewery's flagship.

How I did it: each borough starts where its people actually live, not its geographic middle (2021 census). I timed journeys to all 3,170 pubs in OpenStreetMap with R5, an open-source routing engine, on published bus and rail timetables. Every pub, not a sample, so the shortlist can't have missed a fairer one.

The best 218 were then re-timed on TfL's own Journey Planner, fastest route arriving by 7pm on a Thursday. Only those TfL numbers are published.

Caveats: one arrival time on one day. Journeys include walking, waiting and changes. Timetables shift, so expect the odd minute of drift. The full ranked dataset is a CSV on the page if anyone wants to check it.

Of course I know the Fullback! It was my local when I lived in Finsbury Park, and the Thai food there is top quality. It was in the study; it just didn't make the published table.

The screening pass covers all 3,170 OpenStreetMap pubs. Each one gets timed from all 33 borough population centres. Only the top 200 or so on fairness go through to the TfL pass, and I pinned in a few famous pubs as well. That's the 218 rows. The Fullback never got that far, so CMD + f was never going to find it.

If you're interested though, it landed around 1,300th on the screening pass. About 20 minutes from the best-served borough, 98 from the worst-off. Those are R5 numbers off the open timetable data, not TfL, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Finsbury Park is great from the north and rough from the south-west. The worst-off borough is what counts, and 98 is nowhere near the shortlist.

The problem - and I can't understate this enough - is that these are all relatively close to each other (naturally), in one of the most miserable parts of London you could spend time in. More than 4 hours in that part of town and I start to feel more noticeably depressed.

I get why equidistant is attractive, but you'll have a much nicer time if somebody is going to have a longer journey. So do yourself a favour: go out to Greenwich, or Richmond, or Hampstead. Go somewhere that is greener. Somewhere that's not on/adjacent to Euston Road.

The journey is often whats most fun to me. Just walking somewhere with friends without worries in our minds. The pub visit itself is usually short lived for us. Can't imagine having to walk in a non-green area though, really sounds depressing.

"overstate"