You can’t spell ‘online publishing’ without a very prominent ‘pub’. And London has so many pubs that it’s possible to design niche pub crawls to suit every taste. So as a beery intro to Saturday’s science blogging conference, 20 or so delegates (19 human and one panda) gathered together last night to sample a quartet of London’s public houses, each bar having a scientific connection.

Lots of boozy bloggers, yesterday.

We met in the Jeremy Bentham pub on University Street. Bentham was one of the driving forces behind the creation of University College London, and made significant contributions to philosophy, law and economics. Despite being dead for nearly 200 years, Bentham’s preserved remains still greet visitors to UCL from inside a wooden cabinet in the cloisters. He still attends university meetings, but doesn’t really say very much.

From the Bentham we moved on to the the Museum Tavern, outside the British Museum. The scientific link here is the man in the pub’s hanging sign – Sir Hans Sloane. Most famous today for his eponymous Square over in Chelsea, Sloane was a physician and President of the Royal Society after Newton. He was a great collector of artifacts and botanical samples, and his hoards were used as the basis for the British Museum and latterly the Natural History Museum after his death. He also invented milk chocolate. What a guy.

The third pub was the horror-themed Ben Crouch’s Tavern over in Fitzrovia. Ben Crouch was an infamous bodysnatcher, digging up corpses for London’s physicians to dissect and inspect. The main bar was decked out like Frankenstein’s laboratory, and shorts were served in test tubes. Even the toilets are on-theme. How pleasant to attend to one’s urinary needs while listening to a chainsaw maniac hack into his next victim.

Simon Frantz, Mike Dunford and some dusty glassware. Chainsaw maniac not pictured (probably).

We finished off in the John Snow, Soho. This neat little Sam Smith’s pub commemorates the doctor who first identified the water-borne nature of cholera, and not the Channel 4 news reader. In an early example of scientific visualization, John Snow mapped out the locations of everyone in his parish who died from cholera during an 1854 outbreak. His map clearly showed that most victims lived in the vicinity of one water pump, and he thus concluded that infected water was the source of the disease. He ripped off the handle of the pump, thus ending the outbreak.

There’s nothing better than contemplating fecally tainted water while sipping a pint of Sam Smith’s ale. It was all too much for our smallest drinker, Professor Steve Steve.

But he soon recovered enough to make a very special friend in Bob O’Hara. Sorry Bob. Sorry Professor Steve Steve.

For anyone who wants to follow in our footsteps, here’s a Google Map of the route.