Tonight’s London pub meet-up is at the Blue Posts. An old favourite!

Last time I said I was going to be adventurous with pub choices, and we went to The Albert in Victoria. I’m sorry I didn’t bother writing down any notes about interesting OpenStreetMap discussions from the evening. Rest assured many interesting OpenStreetMap discussions were discussed. My diary entry last time was just about pub choices, and this one will be no different!

Actually I do remember there was a lot of conversation about delivering election leaflets, since we had at least three different people in attendance who do a lot of campaigning, and using OpenStreetMap for that. It’s quite a nice use of OSM since you can boost the addressing coverage in the area of interest, and then use it, and then fix issues while using it, in a nice localised virtuous circle, and the use involves visiting every address, so perfect for filling in any map gaps.

So this was a new pub, and it worked pretty well. I decided to follow a theory I had, that pubs can be less overcrowded and more pleasant when they are further away from tube stations. The Albert pub was about half way between Victoria and Westminster tubes. Not sure it really worked in terms of avoiding the crowds, but it was spacious enough upstairs. There was a very big screen showing the wimbledon which we had to try not be distracted by.

I described this “further away from tube stations” theory to Matt Amos, and he crunched the numbers, rendered the maps, and dedicated a entire geomob talk investigating the “Watering Holes of inaccessibility” concept, including comparing OSMLondon pub choices over the past 18 years to conclude that we do indeed tend to go to pubs which are relatively far from tube stations!

Not always though. One of the pubs we’ve been to many times is The Blue Posts on Newman Street. This one is 363 metres from the Tottenham Court Road tube station. Pretty close. Certainly it always felt very central, but I suppose it is actually almost equidistant to Oxford Circus.

We haven’t been back there in quite a long time because we decided Sam Smiths pubs are a bit weird and we should maybe take our business elsewhere. They’re opposed to mobile phones and social media sharing, which could be inconvenient for tech meet-up! And as organisation they have a track record of making annoying cantankerous decisions. This seems largely thanks to their annoying cantankerous boss, Humphrey Smith. But he died recently, so maybe it’s time to forgive and forget, or at least see how they’re getting on. Maybe they’ll have done away with all those dusty traditional ideas, and strung up TVs in all the corners! Or maybe we’ll be getting there before that enevitably happens. In any case, I’m quite looking forward to going back to this old favourite, maybe just this once.

See you there tonight? All the details on the wiki