London Pub Guide

Between listicles and review sites

Every pub guide on the internet is either a listicle ("10 Best Pubs in London!") or a review site where you wade through user-submitted opinions. Neither format respects your time. A listicle gives you ten options and no way to filter. A review site gives you thousands and too much noise.

The London Pub Guide sits in between: a curated directory of 114 real, verified pubs where you can filter by the things that actually matter when choosing a pub. Dog-friendly? Beer garden? Good Sunday roast? Under a certain price point? Cosy atmosphere? These are the decisions people actually make, and this guide is built around them.

The pub passport adds a layer of gamification that turns visiting pubs into a trackable pursuit. Check in, collect stamps, hit milestones. It turns a directory into something you return to, not just visit once.

Filter, plan, explore

114 real, verified pubs across London. Filter by area, price, vibe, and features: dog-friendly, beer garden, Sunday roast quality, cosy factor. Each pub has consistent details: what makes it special, what to expect, and practical information. Sunday roast ratings score the roast specifically, because in London that is a category of its own.

The pub crawl planner generates walkable routes between pubs, displayed on a Leaflet map with the option to export to Google Maps. Pub of the Week highlights a different selection every seven days. The "Surprise Me" feature picks a random pub when you cannot decide. Near Me uses geolocation to show what is closest.

The pub passport tracks your visits with stamps and a progress ring. Hit milestones and unlock tiers. The "Been There" feature lets you mark pubs you have already visited, so the directory becomes a personal map of your pub history.

Building a guide you can trust

Verification matters. Every pub in this directory is real, open, and worth visiting. I manually checked every single listing. URLs verified, opening hours confirmed, closed venues removed. In a world where AI can hallucinate plausible-sounding pub names and addresses, editorial rigour is the entire value proposition. If it is in the guide, it exists and it is good.

Filter by vibe, not just location. Most pub finders let you search by area and that is it. But when you are choosing a pub, you are choosing an experience. Cosy? Beer garden? Dog-friendly? Good for a group? These are the real decision criteria, so these are the filters. The vibe is the product.

The pub passport as gamification. A directory is useful once. A passport makes it something you return to. The stamps, progress ring, and milestone tiers turn pub-going from a passive activity into something you track and complete. It is a small touch of gamification that transforms a reference tool into a companion.

The crawl planner feature. Planning a pub crawl in London usually means opening Google Maps, picking pubs, checking they are walkable, and hoping for the best. The crawl planner automates the tedious bit: it generates a walkable route between selected pubs, plots them on a Leaflet map, and lets you export to Google Maps. It solves a real friction point in a very London activity.

What building a pub guide taught me

Curation beats volume every time. 114 pubs is not that many. There are thousands of pubs in London. But a smaller, trusted list is infinitely more useful than an exhaustive one. People do not want more options. They want fewer, better options from someone they trust. That principle applies to basically everything.

Gamification needs to feel earned. The pub passport works because collecting stamps at real pubs you actually visit feels meaningful. It would not work if you could just tick them off without going. The friction is the point. Each stamp represents a real experience, a real pint, a real afternoon.

Sunday roasts deserve their own category. This sounds trivial but it was a genuine insight. In London, the Sunday roast is not just a meal, it is a weekend ritual. Rating pubs specifically on their roast quality turned out to be one of the most-used features. Sometimes the niche within the niche is where the real value lives.