Press Kit . pubguidelondon.com

A proper guide to London's pubs, built like the city itself.

114 hand-picked London pubs. Sunday roast ratings. Beer gardens, riverside spots, dog friendly snugs and historic boozers. A daily What's On pipeline that pulls events from six feeds and scores them. One Londoner, one weekend at a time.

Launched 2026 Founder Mike Litman Based London Live pubguidelondon.com
By the numbers

The facts a journalist leads with.

Verified counts from the live site. Every number on this page comes from the published pub data, not a press release.

114
Hand-picked pubs
70
Sunday roasts rated
75
Dog-friendly pubs
67
Beer gardens
42
Historic pubs
The story

A narrative in four beats.

Not a description of the site. The shape of the piece a journalist might file.

The Hook

London has 3,500 pubs. The honest answer is, almost no one needs that many options.

Open any restaurant app and you get a wall of five-star averages. The London Pub Guide flips it. 114 pubs. Hand-picked. A guide written like a friend who knows the city, not a directory that crawled every postcode in the M25.

The Scale

A directory with personality, built by one person at the kitchen table.

Each pub has its own page, its own write-up, its own tip on what to order or where to sit. 70 Sunday roasts are rated and priced. 75 pubs are tagged dog-friendly. 67 have a proper garden. The site has a map view, a Surprise Me button, a Pub Passport for badges, a Pub Crawl Planner, and a What's On feed that runs every morning.

The Moment

The events pipeline runs every day at 7:30am UTC. It scores what's on by how pub-shaped it is.

Six RSS feeds. A scoring model called PINT. Out the other end: a daily-refreshed What's On section ranking the most genuinely pub-relevant events in the city. A guide that updates itself before most pubs open.

The Why

The pub is the only piece of British infrastructure that everyone still uses.

It is church, club, canteen and lounge at once. A guide that takes pubs seriously is a guide that takes London seriously. This one was built for the kind of person who plans a Saturday around the venue, not the venue around the Saturday.

Story angles

Six pitches, pre-formatted.

Each angle is built to drop into a Slack message to your editor. Pick one and lift the headline.

Technology

How a one-person London guide ships a daily events feed with no editorial team.

The What's On section pulls from six RSS feeds, runs a PINT score on every event, and republishes the site through GitHub Actions at 7:30am UTC. A model for what indie publishing looks like in the AI era: a tiny team, a sharp filter, daily output.

Human Interest

The London pub guide written like a friend, not a directory.

114 pubs. Every one has a tip on what to order, where to sit, and what's worth crossing London for. Built by Londoner Mike Litman as the opposite of an algorithmic listings site. The pitch: a proper guide, not another scroll.

Data & Investigative

Where to actually find a five-star Sunday roast in London.

Of 70 rated Sunday roasts on the guide, only 8 score the full five stars. The rest split between four-star (23) and three-or-below. A built-in argument for an end-of-season ranking piece with sourced numbers and named pubs.

Local

Central London is still where the pubs are. Just barely.

Breakdown: 29 in Central, 23 in South, 23 in West, 20 in East, 19 in North. A geographic map of London's pub culture that reads slightly differently from what most listicles show. South London is now level-pegging with the West End.

Human Interest

A new Londoner reads this site and asks, "where do I take my dog?" 75 pubs answer back.

Two-thirds of the guide is dog-friendly. The site has a one-tap filter for it. A snapshot of how London pubs have turned into one of the few public spaces still designed around the social side of city life.

Culture & Society

Britain's last unbundled institution. Why the pub still works when nothing else does.

Banks closed. High streets emptied. Churches went quiet. The pub stayed. 75 of the 114 on the guide welcome dogs, 67 have a garden, 70 cook Sunday lunch. The pub is the last piece of British social infrastructure that everyone still uses, and the guide makes the case with data.

Founder quotes

Quotes you can lift.

All attributed to Mike Litman, founder of The London Pub Guide. Click to copy.

"London has 3,500 pubs. The honest answer is, almost no one needs that many options. The job of a guide is to make the choice for you when you cannot face making it yourself."

Mike Litman . Founder, The London Pub Guide

"The pub is the only piece of British infrastructure that everyone still uses. Church, club, canteen, lounge. A guide that takes pubs seriously is a guide that takes London seriously."

Mike Litman . Founder, The London Pub Guide

"We rated 70 Sunday roasts and only eight earned all five stars. That is not a complaint about London. That is what a real shortlist looks like."

Mike Litman . Founder, The London Pub Guide

"The events pipeline runs at 7:30 in the morning. By the time most pubs unbolt the door, the guide already knows what is on inside them. That is the bar I want every directory to clear."

Mike Litman . Founder, The London Pub Guide
The data

The pubs of London, by area.

A table a journalist can screenshot. Every number from the live site's pub data on the day this page was last updated.

London area Pubs Share of guide
Central 29
25%
South 23
20%
West 23
20%
East 20
18%
North 19
17%
Total 114 Hand-picked, individually written

The pubs of London, by what they are for.

Tags overlap. A pub can be Traditional and Cosy and Dog Friendly at once. These are the most common categories.

Category Pubs Share of guide
Traditional65
57%
Historic42
37%
Beer Garden40
35%
Cosy37
32%
Dog Friendly34
30%
Sunday Roast30
26%
Gastropub30
26%
Craft Beer26
23%
Riverside19
17%
Live Music15
13%

Source: pubguidelondon.com pub data, May 2026. Categories overlap; pubs carry multiple tags.

Draft press release

Ready to file.

Lift it, edit it, send it. Items in brackets are quick swaps for your outlet.

For immediate release

LONDON, [DATE]:

The London Pub Guide launches at pubguidelondon.com: 114 hand-picked pubs, Sunday roast ratings, and a daily events pipeline.

A new editorial guide to the capital's drinking culture, built by London-based founder and digital strategist Mike Litman as a deliberate alternative to algorithmic listing sites.

The London Pub Guide launches today at pubguidelondon.com, offering a hand-picked directory of 114 of London's best pubs, each with its own write-up, ordering tip, and rich detail page.

The guide includes 70 rated Sunday roasts with star scores and prices, 75 dog-friendly pubs, 67 beer gardens, 42 historic pubs, plus a city-wide map, Surprise Me button, Pub Crawl Planner, and a Pub Passport for collecting badges for visited pubs.

A daily What's On pipeline runs every morning at 7:30am UTC, pulling from six RSS feeds and scoring events with an in-house ranking model so that the most pub-relevant gigs, screenings and quiz nights surface to the top.

"London has 3,500 pubs. The honest answer is, almost no one needs that many options," said founder Mike Litman. "The job of a guide is to make the choice for you when you cannot face making it yourself."

Pubs are distributed across Central (29), South (23), West (23), East (20) and North (19), with categories spanning Traditional, Historic, Cosy, Gastropub, Riverside, Craft Beer and Live Music. Each pub page includes nearest station, price band, booking links where available, and "Near This" recommendations.

The site is built as a Progressive Web App, works offline, and deploys automatically through GitHub Actions every day.

The London Pub Guide is the work of Mike Litman, a digital strategist with 15+ years across agencies including R/GA, MediaMonks and AnalogFolk, and clients including Nike, Gucci, Google and BMW. He is a BIMA 100 Tech Pioneer and the founder of more than twenty AI-native cultural products.

The London Pub Guide is at pubguidelondon.com. Press contact: hello@mikelitman.me

### ENDS ###

Social copy

Pre-written posts.

A long-form LinkedIn post and a short X post. Both copy-ready.

Content and links

Where to start reading.

Direct links to the live site, the curated lists, and the crawls.

Live site
pubguidelondon.com
The full guide. Map view, filters, Surprise Me, Pub Passport.
Curated list
Best Sunday roasts in London
70 rated. 8 are full five-star. Star scores and prices on every entry.
Curated list
Best beer gardens
67 of London's best outdoor pubs, sortable by area.
Curated list
Dog-friendly pub guide
75 pubs that welcome four-legged regulars.
Pub crawl
Soho classic crawl
A walkable route through Soho's most storied pubs.
Daily pipeline
What's On in London pubs
Refreshed every morning at 7:30am UTC. PINT-scored events.
For journalists

Exclusive media offer.

What we will give you that nobody else has
An open file on London's pubs, for the right story.
  • The full dataset. All 114 pubs as a clean CSV: area, category, Sunday roast rating, price band, station, features.
  • A custom area or category breakdown. Want the strongest North London showings or the most highly-rated roasts under twenty quid? Ask.
  • A founder interview. Mike Litman on London pub culture, what a curated guide does that an algorithm cannot, and the daily pipeline behind What's On.
  • An embargo preview. Early access to seasonal lists (summer gardens, autumn fireside, Christmas roasts) before they publish.
  • A bespoke commissioned piece. Pub crawl write-ups, neighbourhood guides, or a long-form essay on the British pub, available on request.
Contact: hello@mikelitman.me . Subject line: Press, London Pub Guide
About the founder

Who built this.

Background

Mike Litman is a London-based digital strategist and product builder with 15+ years across the agency and platform world. He has held senior roles at R/GA, MediaMonks, Contagious, AnalogFolk, Dare and Poke, and was founder of independent agency Burst.

His client work spans Nike, Adidas, Google, Meta, Gucci, BMW, P&G, EA, Netflix, Sony, TikTok, McLaren and Unilever, across launches, brand platforms and culture-led campaigns.

The London Pub Guide is one of more than twenty AI-native cultural products he has shipped solo this year, alongside guides to London's restaurants, beaches, family days out and live events.

Credentials

  • BIMA 100 Tech Pioneer
  • Published author, BCS, 2024
  • 20+ shipped AI-native products
  • Founder of Cultural Capital Labs
  • Member of the British Interactive Media Association
  • Based in North London, born here, drinks here
Media enquiries
hello@mikelitman.me
Founder Mike Litman . LinkedIn in/michaellitman