Somewhere around 1999, a group of medical students decided that twenty-seven half-pints in twelve hours sounded like a reasonable Saturday. The Circle Line pub crawl probably didn’t start with them — the tradition appears to go back to the 1960s, when rag week students ran a version called the Twelve Pubs of Christmas — but the medical students were the ones who stretched it to cover every station on the loop. One pub per stop. A half at each. Back to where you started for the twenty-eighth. Twelve hours or you’ve failed.

The tube was the point. Not the pubs, not the beer — the tube. Other London crawls organise themselves by geography or theme or some borrowed board game. The Circle Line crawl uses the infrastructure itself as a drinking itinerary, which gives it a structure no one had to invent. You get on. You get off. You find the nearest pub. You drink. You get back on. The yellow line on the map does the route-planning for you, and the two-minute gaps between stations set the rhythm. It is, in its way, the most democratic pub crawl in London: no opinion required, no curation, just the next stop.

Then TfL broke it. In December 2009, the Circle Line stopped being a circle. The continuous loop — Edgware Road round to Edgware Road, the same service pattern since 1884 — was extended west to Hammersmith and turned into a spiral. Trains now run from Hammersmith, do one lap of the old loop, and terminate back at Edgware Road. The change added stations, improved reliability, and quietly killed the geometry that made the crawl make sense. Twenty-seven became thirty-five if you followed the new map. Most people doing the crawl pretend this didn’t happen. We do the same.

Our route sticks to the original twenty-seven stations: King’s Cross clockwise to Farringdon, the loop as it existed before 2009. You start at The Parcel Yard around 10am — it opens at 8am, which gives you margin — and work westbound through Euston Square, Baker Street, Paddington, and down through Kensington. The southern arc from Sloane Square to Westminster is where the crawl gets interesting: the pubs improve, the pace feels sustainable, you’re roughly halfway. Then the City hits. Blackfriars through to Aldgate is the stretch that ends most attempts — the pubs close early on weekends, the distances feel longer because you’re tired, and the light is going. If you make it to Hamilton Hall at Liverpool Street with your faculties intact, you’ll finish. Moorgate, Barbican, Farringdon: three stops, three pubs, done.

Boris Johnson’s 2008 alcohol ban on TfL services didn’t kill the crawl but it changed the texture. The night before the ban took effect — 31 May 2008 — thousands packed the Circle Line for one last legal drink on the tube. Six stations had to close. Seventeen people were arrested. The crawl survived, obviously, because you drink in pubs, not on trains. But the ban removed the option of a between-stations can, which used to smooth the transitions. Now you walk into each pub cold sober from the platform, which is arguably how it should have been all along.

The completion rate is low. Most groups lose someone around Gloucester Road and lose the plot around Cannon Street. A thirteen-and-a-half-hour finish is the longest we’ve seen documented. Halves are not optional — they’re structural. If you drink pints, you will not finish, and the crawl will stop being fun somewhere around pub fourteen. The point was never the volume. The point was the loop.