alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
> 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.
Is there any (non-pub) location in London that could satisfy the 60 minute requirement?
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.