The most efficient crawl ever? Academics plot round trip of more than 24,000 UK pubs

By Daniel Woolfson

- Last updated on GMT

Round trip: hypothetical crawlers could start at any pub on the route and eventually end up back there (pictured: Central London)
Round trip: hypothetical crawlers could start at any pub on the route and eventually end up back there (pictured: Central London)

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Academics who spent two years plotting the shortest possible crawl round 24,727 of the UK’s pubs have released their results to the public.

A research team from the University of Waterloo in Canada laid out the journey on an interactive Google map. It comes in at 45,495 kilometres, which is longer than the circumference of the Earth itself.  

The pub crawl doesn’t have a start or finish. Drinkers could theoretically start at any one pub in the country and eventually end up back where they started.

Glasgow pubs
Glasgow's pubs pictured on the interactive map

However, the team behind the map told The Guardian ​the map was created “as a means for developing and testing general-purpose optimization methods” rather than encouraging the nation’s drinkers.

The longest distance between two pubs on the journey is approximately 435 kilometres between the Sango Sands Oasis in Durness, Scotland and the Bells But & Ben in Shetland, which requires two ferry rides and would take approximately 50 hours. 

brightonpubbbb
Some city's routes are considerably more complex than others' (pictured: Brighton)
  • View the entire interactive map​.

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