The Equidistance Pub Index
London’s most equidistant pub
London’s most equidistant pub is The Greene Man at 383 Euston Road, on the corner of Great Portland Street. 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.
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: two of the 218 measured, less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street station.
Jump to: the ten fairest pubs · the two centres of London · your borough · famous pubs · method
The ten fairest pubs in London
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.
“Worst case” is the longest journey any borough faces. “Spread” is the gap between the nearest borough’s journey and the furthest’s.
The list is an unbroken corridor along the Euston Road, from Baker Street in the west to Euston in the east: dense tube interchange to the west, Elizabeth line access via Tottenham Court Road, and mainline stations on the doorstep for the rail-dependent outer boroughs.
Fairness makes no judgement about the beer. The winner is a Greene King pub, and number four is the Wetherspoon above Baker Street station. Number three, the Lucky Saint, is the flagship pub of an alcohol-free brewery; fairness makes no judgement about the strength, either. The George & Dragon on Cleveland Street, an independent free house and the West End’s only brewpub, sits at number five.
One pub is missing from the ten. On raw journey time the Huntley on Gower Street comes ninth, but it is University College London’s students’ union bar, open only in UCL’s term, which starts on 28 September, so it is shut on the modelled Thursday. It stays in the downloadable dataset, not on a list of places anyone can actually meet.
No pub within an hour of everyone
Hillingdon sets the winner’s limit. From its population centre in North Hillingdon, the Greene Man is 70 minutes away by the time the walk, the wait and the interchange are counted. No single borough is the whole problem, though: leave Hillingdon out and the best pub is still 64 minutes from someone, and Hillingdon, Sutton and Havering all have to go before one comes within the hour. Ease the cap up five minutes at a time and the pubs are slow to appear:
| Worst-case cap (minutes) | Pubs everyone can reach in time |
|---|---|
| 50 | 0 |
| 55 | 0 |
| 60 | 0 |
| 65 | 0 |
| 70 | 2 |
| 75 | 34 |
| 80 | 99 |
| 85 | 198 |
| 90 | 209 |
Counts are over the 218 pubs re-measured with TfL. The R5 screen covered all 3,170 and rules out any pub reaching everyone inside 60 minutes; above that line the table counts the shortlist, not the city.
One footnote for purists: The Railway in West Hampstead has the single smallest spread of all, 46 minutes, but leaves the worst-off borough 76 minutes out, so it falls at any cap below 76.
The centre of London is in the wrong place
In 2014 the geographic centre of Greater London, the point that balances the city’s shape, was calculated to sit beside Greet House on Frazier Street, SE1; this study’s boundaries reproduce that point to within 2.5 metres. The nearest pub, 86 metres away, is The Duke of Sussex on Baylis Road. If geography decided fairness, that would be London’s natural meeting place. The network disagrees:
| Pub | Spread | Worst case | Average |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Duke of Sussex, Baylis Road (nearest the geographic centre) | 57 | 82 | 49.1 |
| The Greene Man, Euston Road (network winner) | 47 | 70 | 49.3 |
The averages are almost identical, but meeting at the geographic centre costs the worst-off borough an extra 12 minutes and widens the gap between the luckiest and unluckiest journeys by 10. Measured in travel time rather than distance, the centre of London is 2.1 miles north-west of where the map puts it, on the Euston Road.
The borough league
Mean journey time from each borough’s population centre to the 218 shortlisted pubs, worst-served first, alongside the journey to the winner. Every borough’s residents can judge their own deal.
| Borough | To The Greene Man | Mean to shortlist |
|---|---|---|
| Hillingdon | 70 | 79 |
| Sutton | 69 | 71 |
| Havering | 67 | 69 |
| Kingston upon Thames | 69 | 67 |
| Richmond upon Thames | 69 | 67 |
| Hounslow | 64 | 63 |
| Bexley | 64 | 62 |
| Greenwich | 62 | 61 |
| Barking and Dagenham | 60 | 61 |
| Enfield | 52 | 58 |
| Bromley | 55 | 57 |
| Croydon | 56 | 57 |
| Redbridge | 56 | 56 |
| Wandsworth | 56 | 55 |
| Merton | 52 | 52 |
| Lewisham | 59 | 51 |
| Brent | 41 | 51 |
| Newham | 48 | 50 |
| Waltham Forest | 42 | 49 |
| Barnet | 43 | 48 |
| Southwark | 50 | 48 |
| Hackney | 43 | 48 |
| Ealing | 50 | 46 |
| Harrow | 42 | 46 |
| Tower Hamlets | 43 | 46 |
| Hammersmith and Fulham | 39 | 40 |
| Lambeth | 38 | 39 |
| Haringey | 33 | 39 |
| Islington | 29 | 35 |
| Camden | 30 | 32 |
| Kensington and Chelsea | 27 | 32 |
| Westminster | 27 | 30 |
| City of London | 23 | 29 |
Famous pubs, ranked by unfairness
The pubs people actually suggest are mostly terrible places to meet. A riverside tavern or a hilltop inn is out of the way almost by definition. Top of the list is the Prospect of Whitby, which claims to be London’s oldest riverside pub and leaves the worst-off borough 96 minutes out. Ranked by spread, least equidistant first:
| Pub | Where | Spread | Worst case |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Prospect of Whitby | Wapping | 77 | 96 |
| The Palm Tree | Mile End | 76 | 98 |
| The Dove | Hammersmith | 74 | 94 |
| The Ten Bells | Spitalfields | 72 | 94 |
| The Seven Stars | Carey Street | 72 | 93 |
| The Churchill Arms | Kensington | 68 | 75 |
| The Blackfriar | Blackfriars | 68 | 83 |
| Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese | Fleet Street | 67 | 84 |
| Cittie of Yorke | Holborn | 67 | 84 |
| Spaniards Inn | Hampstead | 66 | 96 |
| George Inn | Borough | 65 | 85 |
| The Flask | Highgate | 64 | 95 |
| The Mayflower | Rotherhithe | 64 | 92 |
| Ye Olde Mitre | Holborn | 63 | 79 |
| The Grenadier | Belgravia | 58 | 87 |
| The Lamb and Flag | Covent Garden | 57 | 86 |
| The Harp | Covent Garden | 56 | 87 |
| French House | Soho | 54 | 81 |
Questions and answers
What is London’s most equidistant pub?
The Greene Man at 383 Euston Road, Fitzrovia. Measured from the population centres of all 33 London boroughs, arriving by 7pm on a Thursday by public transport, journeys to it span 47 minutes between the nearest borough and the furthest, and no borough needs more than 70 minutes. No pub in London does better on both measures.
Is any pub in London within an hour of all 33 boroughs?
No. Of 3,170 pubs tested, none can be reached within 60 minutes from every borough’s population centre by public transport. The first pubs become reachable by everyone at 70 minutes: two of the 218 measured, both by Great Portland Street station.
How were the journey times measured?
Every published figure is a TfL Journey Planner result: the fastest journey arriving by 19:00 on Thursday 17 September 2026, from each borough’s population-weighted centroid (Census 2021) to each pub. A full journey-time grid over all 3,170 OpenStreetMap pubs, computed with the open-source R5 routing engine on TfL and National Rail open timetables, chose the 218 pubs that TfL then re-measured. 7,194 journeys were timed.
What does “most equidistant” mean here?
The pub that is fairest to all 33 boroughs, measured in minutes of travel, not distance. The headline ranking keeps the worst-off borough’s journey as short as possible, then minimises the spread between the luckiest borough and the unluckiest.
How can I find a fair meeting place for my own group?
Use Equidistance: type up to four starting points and it finds pubs, cafes, restaurants or parks where everyone’s journey time is as equal as possible, by public transport, car, bike or on foot. It works in any browser, with no account.
What is the least equidistant famous pub?
The Prospect of Whitby in Wapping: 77 minutes separate its nearest borough from its furthest, and the worst-off borough travels 96 minutes. The most equidistant famous pub is the French House in Soho, with a 54-minute spread.
Equidistance finds pubs, cafes, restaurants or parks where everyone’s journey takes about the same time, for up to four people.
Find your fair pub →Method, in brief
Origins are the population-weighted centroids of Greater London’s 33 local authorities, the 32 boroughs and the City of London, built from Census 2021 population and ONS LSOA centroids, so each starts where its people live rather than at its geometric middle. (The narrative calls all 33 “boroughs” for brevity.) Candidate pubs are every amenity=pub in OpenStreetMap’s Greater London extract, 3,170 in all.
A full journey-time grid was computed with the open-source R5 routing engine on open GTFS timetables (bus, tube, DLR, tram, National Rail, Overground, Elizabeth line), validated mode by mode against TfL. The 218 candidates were the 200 pubs with the narrowest spreads on the screen, plus 18 pinned for comparison: 16 famous pubs and two called the Duke of Sussex. Each was then re-measured with the TfL Journey Planner, fastest journey arriving by 19:00 on Thursday 17 September 2026, and only those TfL figures are published. A pub with a short worst case but a wide spread could sit outside that set; around 40 such pubs, mostly between Paddington and Notting Hill, were not re-measured with TfL. The cap counts above 60 minutes are counts of the 218.
The 60-minute cap in the original design proved unattainable, which became the headline finding; the full cap sweep is above. The winner and podium were verified as trading in July 2026. Journey times are point to point including walking, waiting and interchange, and were collected on 15 July 2026: TfL publishes its timetables in advance, so the Journey Planner answers a future date with real scheduled journeys. Timetables change, so reproduce any journey at tfl.gov.uk.
Download the full ranked dataset (CSV, all 218 TfL-measured pubs), free to reuse under the ODbL with credit to Equidistance and OpenStreetMap contributors.
Notes for editors
The map and the tables are free to reuse with credit to Equidistance. The full dataset is under the ODbL, as above. The numbers behind any single borough are available on request: [email protected]. Every journey time can be checked against tfl.gov.uk: the fastest journey arriving by 7pm on an ordinary term-time Thursday. The published figures were collected for Thursday 17 September 2026; timetables shift, so expect the odd minute of drift on a later date.