London’s most equidistant pub
equidistance.io
equidistance.io
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.
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.
If I am going to subject myself to the horrors of London's over-crowded, over-priced, delay-ridden, filthy public transport then I sure as hell am not going to be doing that just to end up in the filthy confines of Euston Road.
Seriously.
Cool, fun blog post I will give that bit credit.
But the conclusion, "go to a pub on Euston Road" ? No. No. No. and NO !
This used to be a real problem before TfL put on night buses and late-night tube trains. The centre of town would be a deserted wasteland before a normal town centre would get started with nightlife. The city and Westminster are even worse, not helped by 'absentee landlords' that own luxury properties that are empty with no lights on.
I don't think London suburbs are much better, you need a regional town if you are to meet friends or do things with workmates, after work. However, in a regional town, there is the assumption that the grass is greener in London, with London the only place that gets top quality gigs and whatnot. This might be the case, but the inevitable geographic dispersion of people you know makes it unlikely that you ever enjoy much in the centre of London.
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.
* close to work place (as you said)
* somewhere that is located such that they are shortening their return home after the pub / total travel time of work to home is similar to work to pub to home)
* convenient to the most people (if three friends live in Battersea and one is in Hampstead - the pub is going to be in Battersea not somewhere bayswater or Knightsbridge).
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.
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.
Perfect on a hot day for a cold 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.
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.
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.
And logically this makes sense, because you can see the pub problem as a subset of locations within all locations, and all of these pubs are clustered around an equidistant point at ~72 minutes from everywhere in London. If such a location existed, it would have to be within that cluster, but somehow an average of > 12 minutes travel to all those pubs in that grouping. An eye ball test on a map tells you that isn't possible.
You might be asking "is there another location without pubs that is more equidistant", and mathematically that could yield a coffee shop, except in London it won't because the equidistant point for all of London and the equidistant pub basically are at the same point to within hundreds of yards, because of how public transport and public houses are distributed across all boroughs.
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.
It's an interesting project, but that makes it completely worthless.
Nobody's driving to central London anyway - journey times are measured by public transport. And even if they were driving, the journey times by car are completely dictated by traffic. The average weekday speed in central London is 7.1 mph.
What question does this answer? Where can me and all my friends meet in our cars at 2am?
Sure, one of my original intents was to get public transit data and include it. Turns out that's somewhat harder to get right than car/foot/cycle routing with OSM map data.
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.
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.
> Starting from where each of the 33 boroughs’ residents actually live, and arriving by 7pm on an ordinary September Thursday by public transport, journeys to it span 47 minutes between the nearest borough and the furthest, and no borough needs more than 70. No pub in London does better on both measures.
I had to spell my way through this to work out what it means.
"Starting from where each of the 33 boroughs' residents actually live"
Presumably they live all over each of those 33 boroughs - so this is just nonsense. Or has the "author" carried out a study of the distribution of residential property vs commercial property in each borough, and then picked starting points for each borough? Who knows.
"and arriving by 7pm on an ordinary September Thursday by public transport"
"An ordinary September Thursday" is the sort of ponderous nonsense that AI loves to insert to make writing feel important, but it means nothing at all.
"journeys to it span 47 minutes between the nearest borough and the furthest, and no borough needs more than 70."
"journeys to it" - to what? The pub? Just say so.
"span 47 minutes between the nearest borough and the furthest"
The more I look at this the less I know what it means. The nearest borough is the borough the pub is in - and so someone living next door will take about two minutes to get there. From the "furthest" borough does it take 47 minutes to get there? And by what measure? If you're getting the tube from the "furthest" borough what if you live 20 minutes walk from the nearest tube station?
But then we find that, actually, it doesn't take 47 minutes from the furthest borough because "and no borough needs more than 70". So what's the "span" about? I think it means "if you live in the borough furthest away from this pub, it will take you 47 minutes longer to get there than if you live in the nearest borough". But I suspect the "nearest borough" means "neighbouring borough" rather than the borough in which the pub itself is located.
"No pub in London does better on both measures"
What are the two "measures"? I thought we were talking about one, which is the longest travel time. What's the other measure? I think it means that the two measures are "travel time from the nearest borough" and "travel time from the furthest borough". But this reintroduces the problem of what happens if you live next door to the pub?
Imagine you're looking for a pub in London to visit with friends from around the city, and you want to find one that is a fairly equal journey for everyone involved no matter where in London they live. It's a trickier problem than you might think, and having crunched the numbers there are a surprisingly small number of pubs that fit the criteria. In fact, by my calculations, the best placed pub is The Greene Man on Euston Road because the longest journey someone will need to make, no matter where in London's 33 boroughs they live, is 70 minutes. For those who live closer, in neighbouring boroughs (but not within the borough itself) it will take around 33 minutes to get there - so the span between nearest and furthest is just 47 minutes.
>The bigger finding is what nobody manages: not one of London’s 3,170 pubs is within an hour of all 33 boroughs. Keep the worst-off borough to 60 minutes and the list of qualifying pubs is empty. It stays empty at 65. The first pubs that everyone can reach appear at 70 minutes, and there are exactly two of them, less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street station.
This is even worse.
"The bigger finding is what nobody manages" - this is absolute gibberish.
I think it means "The more interesting data point that this study uncovered is that there are no pubs in London that can be reached in 60 minutes or less from all 33 of London's boroughs."
"Keep the worst-off borough to 60 minutes and the list of qualifying pubs is empty." More gibberish.
Worst-off borough? The poorest? Or do we mean "worst off" in terms of travel time to a randomly selected pub? But that in itself makes no sense, because there are going to be plenty of pubs that you can travel to in under 60 minutes from the "worst off borough". So it must mean something different.
"It stays empty at 65."
No idea what this means on first read. But then, looking back, it means "If you increase the time from 60 to 65 minutes, there are still no pubs that qualify". But there's still the same problem from the previous clause - what are the qualification criteria for this "empty list".
"The first pubs that everyone can reach appear at 70 minutes, and there are exactly two of them, less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street station."
You need to increase the maximum travel time to 70 minutes, and then no matter what borough someone lives in, there are two pubs that anyone can reach.
"Exactly two of them". Exactly two? Or just two? Or slightly less than two? Can you have slightly less than two when you're talking about pubs?
"Less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street station".
Are the pubs "by Great Portland Street station" and one hundred metres from each other? Or are the pubs each one hundred metres from Great Portland Street station? Or are they one hundred metres from each other, and the quickest route from wherever you're coming is via Great Portland Street station?
We then veer into utter gobbledegook.
>"Ranked by keeping the worst-off borough’s journey as short as possible, then by the spread between the luckiest borough and the unluckiest. Every number is a TfL Journey Planner arrive-by-7pm journey from a borough’s population-weighted centre.
This does actually give a little more clarity on the earlier question, of what the "where each of the 33 boroughs residents live" means. It turns out that yes, the author has done some sort of population distribution analysis.
But we're introducing yet more opaque terminology. Earlier we talked about "poorest borough" but now we are talking about "luckiest" and "unluckiest". Is "unluckiest" the same as "poorest"?
‘Worst case’ is the longest journey any borough faces. ‘Spread’ is the gap between the nearest borough’s journey and the furthest’s.
"Furthests's" is 100% actual gibberish.
I could go on.
The whole thing is definitely written by AI, and what's worse is that author either hasn't realised, or hasn't cared that the output is effectively unreadable.
Also, there's no reason not to use AI to help you get your thoughts straight, create some bullets you can write from, give you some structure - and then help you proof your finished writing.
The problem is that when you get AI to write something from scratch like this, it decides what the story is, and how to tell it. If you decide the key storylines, work out what matters to you, work with the AI to brainstorm some ideas and then write that up in your own words and then get the AI to help you polish it but not rewrite it you'll have far better outputs.
I posted a really long response to the parent comment, highlighting the stuff that made it stink of AI. Watch out for those if you do this sort of process.
Oh hi Claude, how are you doing?
I use Claude for various projects of my own, so I read its prose a lot. Its writing style seems to be becoming increasingly idiosyncratic, which might be a good thing.
When I release something it wrote, though, I try to make the origin clear. For example: