On 30 January 1969, the Beatles played their last live performance on the roof of 3 Savile Row. The Metropolitan Police shut it down after forty-two minutes. That rooftop is now an Abercrombie & Fitch. This is roughly the level of indignity you should prepare for on a Beatles pub crawl through London.

The honest problem is that the Beatles were not a London pub band. They were a Liverpool pub band who moved to London to make records. Between 1962 and 1970 they spent the overwhelming majority of their London hours inside Abbey Road Studios in St John’s Wood and, later, Trident Studios on St Anne’s Court in Soho and the basement studio at Apple’s Savile Row headquarters. Studios don’t have pint glasses. Studios have tape machines and session musicians and George Martin telling you to do it again. The Beatles’ London story is fundamentally a story about work, not about drinking, and any pub crawl that claims otherwise is selling you something.

So we built this one honestly. A couple of the stops have genuine, documented Beatles connections. The Horse & Groom in Belgravia was Brian Epstein’s local — he lived around the corner on Chapel Street and held band meetings at his flat, which meant the nearest pint was fifty metres down a cobbled mews. The City Barge in Chiswick is where they filmed the tiger-in-the-cellar scene for Help! in April 1965, and Ringo’s line about “two lagers and lime” was delivered at the actual bar. These are photographed, dated, verifiable facts.

The rest of the crawl is more like proximity drinking. De Hems in Soho was a music industry pub where Andrew Loog Oldham — who did PR for Epstein before managing the Stones — was a regular, and Trident Studios was two streets away. The Shakespeare’s Head is around the corner from the London Palladium, where the Beatles performed on Sunday Night at the London Palladium in October 1963 and kicked off Beatlemania. The Devonshire Arms is directly behind 3 Savile Row, which makes it the nearest pub to Apple Corps, though “the nearest pub to Apple Corps” is not quite the same thing as “a Beatles pub.”

We think that’s fine. We think being upfront about thin connections is more interesting than pretending every stop has a plaque. The route runs from Belgravia through Soho and Marylebone, then jumps by tube to Kentish Town and out to the riverside in Chiswick. It covers about five hours if you’re not rushing, and you shouldn’t rush, because the pubs themselves are good regardless of who may or may not have drunk in them. The Star Tavern is where the Great Train Robbery was planned. The Assembly House has one of north London’s finest surviving Victorian interiors. The Barley Mow has been pouring since 1793 and its neighbour was Charles Babbage.

Eight pubs. Two with solid Beatles connections, three with reasonable proximity claims, and three that are just good pubs in the right postcodes. We’ve put them in an order that makes geographical sense and gives you a reason to visit Chiswick, which most crawls don’t. If you want the Cavern Club, go to Liverpool. If you want a good afternoon of London pubs with a Beatles thread running through it — sometimes tight, sometimes loose — this is it.