In 1935, Victor Watson, managing director of Waddingtons in Leeds, sent his secretary Marjory Phillips to London with a notepad and instructions to pick streets for a board game. They stopped for afternoon tea in Islington — the Angel, specifically, which is how a Lyon’s Corner House ended up on a Monopoly board. The streets they chose still exist, mostly. Vine Street doesn’t, not really — it’s 21 metres of dead end behind Piccadilly, the shortest street on the board and the hardest to find a pub for. Old Kent Road is still Old Kent Road. Mayfair is still Mayfair. And the price gap between them, which was already the point in 1935, has only widened. A flat on Old Kent Road costs about £380,000 today. A flat on Mount Street in Mayfair costs north of five and a half million. The board knew.

The Monopoly pub crawl takes this wealth gradient and makes you walk through it in real time. You start south of the river at 11am outside the Lord Nelson, one of only two pubs left on Old Kent Road — a street that once had 39. You cycle across Tower Bridge, drink in a railway arch near Fenchurch Street, pass through a timber-framed building that survived the Great Fire, and work your way north to Islington, where Watson and Phillips had their tea three generations ago. By mid-afternoon you’re in Mayfair, where the pints cost more than your hourly wage and the supercars parked outside the pub cost more than your house. By evening you’re stumbling through Soho and the West End, past Leicester Square and down Regent Street, finishing at The Duchess on Duke Street around 11pm — if you finish at all.

Twenty-six pubs in roughly twelve hours. The maths is unforgiving. You have about 28 minutes per stop including travel time. Halves are non-negotiable unless you want to be face-down on Bow Street by pub eighteen. We stick to halves everywhere except a few stations and the final stop, and even then we’ve had crawls where the last three pubs were a blur. The total liquid intake is around 17 pints-equivalent if you go full measures, which nobody should. Most groups who attempt it don’t finish. The ones who do tend to have a spreadsheet, a timekeeper, and someone sober enough to navigate the Northern line at 1pm.

The route isn’t the board order — it can’t be, because the board skips around London without caring about geography. The optimised crawl runs south to north to west, roughly: Old Kent Road, through the City, up to Islington and King’s Cross, across to Marylebone, down through Mayfair, into the West End, and finishing near Oxford Street. There are four stations woven in — Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street, King’s Cross, and Marylebone — each one a Wetherspoons or a Fuller’s, each one a chance to eat something and recalibrate.

What nobody tells you beforehand is that the crawl is secretly an economic geography lesson. You feel the neighbourhoods change as you move through the board. The browns are industrial south London. The light blues are scruffy-beautiful Islington. The stations punctuate with commuter pragmatism. The dark blues are Mayfair money, quiet streets and nine-pound pints. The pinks are Westminster grandeur. The reds are Fleet Street and Covent Garden — literary history and theatre crowds. The yellows and greens are Soho and the West End, where everything accelerates and the pavement fills with people and you realise you’ve been drinking for ten hours. By the time you reach Oxford Street, you’re walking through streets most Londoners can’t afford to live on, holding a half-pint that cost more than your first three rounds combined.