Pubbing our way around London’s Capital Ring
Towards the end of Covid Lockdown 2 in March 2021, with the weather starting to show some promising signs of improvement, and in a vague attempt at some monotony relieving exercise we took a walk up to Horsenden Hill.
During this walk, I noticed that part of the route took us along the Capital Ring. This started my wondering how long it’s likely to be and some rough estimates and some basic maths produced a figure that was pleasingly only 10 miles from the correct answer of 78 miles.
With the realisation that we were some way off being able to travel anywhere exciting, we were resigned to spending much of the upcoming spring and summer in London. At this point we were 3 weeks away from pubs being allowed to reopen, and having always been a fan of a walk with the reward of a pint or two a plan started to form…
Whist still walking back towards Ealing from Horsenden Hill, we wondered how many sections we could realistically divide it up into to be able to walk the entire ring. Thankfully on getting back home I found that this has handily been done by Transport for London, who have produced a detailed guide, splitting it into 15 bite sized sections.
With that part of the plan already done for me, all I needed to do was to select some pubs for each walk, as well as plan our routes to and from the start and end points. For the pub selection, I only had a couple of criteria: the pub must be within 5 minutes walk of the route, and have a reasonable rating (4.2 or higher) on Google Maps.
On on!