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.
I have a readers card for the BL, and agree its a marvellous thing - I regularly head over there despite my earlier comment about getting depressed on Euston Road.
My preferred way to deal with this part of town: slip out of Kings X and into BL as fast as possible, do what research I need to be do in BL, then walk at speed to the Waterstones on Gower Street (which is not like any other Waterstones in the country, I love it), then if you have time, maybe head down to the British Museum and check out one or two of the rooms. Then, get out of there. If you want a pint, the pubs nearer BL are not as depressing, and you're now on your way to Soho anyway...
To contextualise my earlier comment though: I grew up in the North of England, and for many years I hated London. Every time I visited it felt oppressive and horrible. In 2005 I ended up needing to spend a week doing some client visits, stayed in a place near Warren Street, but had a couple of days off to go exploring in between things. Went to Hyde Park. Went to Greenwich. Went to South Kensington.
I realised I didn't hate London, (how can you hate being lost in the middle of Hyde Park of Kensington Gardens on a warm sunlit day?), it's just that my experience of London until that point was getting a train into Euston and then getting a tube to somewhere like Covent Garden, or Bank, or staying near Euston on Euston Road.
Long story short: my partner and I moved to Barons Court in 2012, and then Twickenham in 2017. Couldn't be happier.
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.
"Equidistant" is not a good metric for convenience. The most convenient pubs are nearly always someone's local or the midpoint between everyone's workplace.
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.
There appears to be no search; doing a “CMD + f” and searching for “The Faltering Fullback” got no results.
Why do I remember “The Faltering Fullback?” One has to be introduced by a local, or by someone who loves Irish Pub. A friend took me to The Faltering Fullback; it is an Irish pub with a Thai delivery restaurant license operating inside it.
> it is an Irish pub with a Thai delivery restaurant license operating inside it.
My favourite pub when I lived in Glasgow, The Three Judges, was immediately next door to an excellent Pakistani takeaway (and there are a lot of those in Glasgow, but this one was easily top 10% stuff) and didn't mind you bringing in food.
So once you were halfway down the blackboard and starting to feel the need for something to soak up all the ale, pop next door, get a couple of samosas, ask the bar staff if they wanted anything of course, and settle down for the second half.
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.
It's cute but after a paragraph or two I immediately thought, let me choose what Burroughs I care about and get a result. However, the link to do this was way, way down the page.
The origin point selected here is roughly Mermaid House, on the north side between the Millennium Bridge and Blackfriars station.
My route-finding here is more than a little naïve, instant acceleration to each road's speed limit, full-speed turns, no traffic, lights always with you, etc. but there is a place within 60 minutes of all locations, pre-selected in that URL.
Google Maps gives quite broad time ranges if you say you're travelling at 02:00, so there to e.g. Langleybury House & Film Centre, just inside the M25 in Watford, is 45m to 65m.
Logically, no, as they all neighbour non-pub locations. There's a coffee shop or restaurant within a minute or two of each of the top 5, from memory.
There used to be some UK celebs (David Baddiel, Clive Anderson, others...), who used to regularly eat in a restaurant near the Crown & Anchor after their weekly 5-a-side football games, which is why it stands out in my mind.
>Logically, no, as they all neighbour non-pub locations.
I don't understand this response, so I am wondering if I phrased my question badly.
The linked article established that there is no pub in London that can be reached within 60 minutes travel time by anyone starting from any home in any London borough.
I was wondering if there is any other location, be it a coffee shop, a park or even just a point in the middle of a road somewhere, that can be reached within 60 minutes by anyone who lives anywhere in London.
Slop has no opinion on good writing either. My heart sank when I opened your website. I genuinely thought it was going to be interesting and it was just a screed of AI gibberish.
It's not "gibberish", but it's got the stink of AI prose about it. The author's comments here do too.
Of course I might just be over-sensitised to certain turns of phrase and the author might be completely abstaining from bot commenting, but it has that overpowering flavour to it for me.
So to the author, if you are using AI to write your text, you might want to re-consider. Something superficially less polished might in fact be more appealing.
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.
See the Magna Carta at the British library. Pint at said pub. Curry on Drummond Street. Then catch a band at ULU.
I have a readers card for the BL, and agree its a marvellous thing - I regularly head over there despite my earlier comment about getting depressed on Euston Road.
My preferred way to deal with this part of town: slip out of Kings X and into BL as fast as possible, do what research I need to be do in BL, then walk at speed to the Waterstones on Gower Street (which is not like any other Waterstones in the country, I love it), then if you have time, maybe head down to the British Museum and check out one or two of the rooms. Then, get out of there. If you want a pint, the pubs nearer BL are not as depressing, and you're now on your way to Soho anyway...
To contextualise my earlier comment though: I grew up in the North of England, and for many years I hated London. Every time I visited it felt oppressive and horrible. In 2005 I ended up needing to spend a week doing some client visits, stayed in a place near Warren Street, but had a couple of days off to go exploring in between things. Went to Hyde Park. Went to Greenwich. Went to South Kensington.
I realised I didn't hate London, (how can you hate being lost in the middle of Hyde Park of Kensington Gardens on a warm sunlit day?), it's just that my experience of London until that point was getting a train into Euston and then getting a tube to somewhere like Covent Garden, or Bank, or staying near Euston on Euston Road.
Long story short: my partner and I moved to Barons Court in 2012, and then Twickenham in 2017. Couldn't be happier.
But I still feel sad when I'm on Euston Road.
My favourite pub in this area, The Bree Louise, is sadly no more.
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"
"Equidistant" is not a good metric for convenience. The most convenient pubs are nearly always someone's local or the midpoint between everyone's workplace.
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.
There appears to be no search; doing a “CMD + f” and searching for “The Faltering Fullback” got no results.
Why do I remember “The Faltering Fullback?” One has to be introduced by a local, or by someone who loves Irish Pub. A friend took me to The Faltering Fullback; it is an Irish pub with a Thai delivery restaurant license operating inside it.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/u3s3LzeeQrRGDQCS7
> it is an Irish pub with a Thai delivery restaurant license operating inside it.
My favourite pub when I lived in Glasgow, The Three Judges, was immediately next door to an excellent Pakistani takeaway (and there are a lot of those in Glasgow, but this one was easily top 10% stuff) and didn't mind you bringing in food.
So once you were halfway down the blackboard and starting to feel the need for something to soak up all the ale, pop next door, get a couple of samosas, ask the bar staff if they wanted anything of course, and settle down for the second half.
They mean the most equitemporal for people starting from different locations and meeting at that 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.
It's cute but after a paragraph or two I immediately thought, let me choose what Burroughs I care about and get a result. However, the link to do this was way, way down the page.
Is there any (non-pub) location in London that could satisfy the 60 minute requirement?
Conveniently, I've put together an isochrone map generator:
https://benwheatley.github.io/Isochrone/web/?region=london&c...
The origin point selected here is roughly Mermaid House, on the north side between the Millennium Bridge and Blackfriars station.
My route-finding here is more than a little naïve, instant acceleration to each road's speed limit, full-speed turns, no traffic, lights always with you, etc. but there is a place within 60 minutes of all locations, pre-selected in that URL.
Google Maps gives quite broad time ranges if you say you're travelling at 02:00, so there to e.g. Langleybury House & Film Centre, just inside the M25 in Watford, is 45m to 65m.
Logically, no, as they all neighbour non-pub locations. There's a coffee shop or restaurant within a minute or two of each of the top 5, from memory.
There used to be some UK celebs (David Baddiel, Clive Anderson, others...), who used to regularly eat in a restaurant near the Crown & Anchor after their weekly 5-a-side football games, which is why it stands out in my mind.
>Logically, no, as they all neighbour non-pub locations.
I don't understand this response, so I am wondering if I phrased my question badly.
The linked article established that there is no pub in London that can be reached within 60 minutes travel time by anyone starting from any home in any London borough.
I was wondering if there is any other location, be it a coffee shop, a park or even just a point in the middle of a road somewhere, that can be reached within 60 minutes by anyone who lives anywhere in London.
> The maths has no opinion on beer.
Slop has no opinion on good writing either. My heart sank when I opened your website. I genuinely thought it was going to be interesting and it was just a screed of AI gibberish.
It's not "gibberish", but it's got the stink of AI prose about it. The author's comments here do too.
Of course I might just be over-sensitised to certain turns of phrase and the author might be completely abstaining from bot commenting, but it has that overpowering flavour to it for me.
So to the author, if you are using AI to write your text, you might want to re-consider. Something superficially less polished might in fact be more appealing.