2 hours ago · 5 min read1084 words · Writing · hide · 0 comments

What if all the places in London competed in a knockout competition to see which was best? It'd be like the World Cup but without the football, just an enormous branching chain of towns, suburbs and other settlements. All you'd need is a huge list and a willingness to make hundreds of subjective geographical judgements. Who would win this Ultimate London World Cup? I'm game, so first of all I made a list. I looked at all 32 boroughs, not including the City because that's atypical (and because it was very likely to win otherwise). For each borough I listed eight of its most important settlements, which was much harder for Barking & Dagenham than for Westminster. That gave me an enormous list of 32×8 = 256 London places, which I then shuffled into an entirely random order. 256 is of course a power of 2 which allows me to create a perfect knockout tournament with no byes. This starts with the Round of 256, moves onto the Round of 128, then the Round of 64 and Round of 32, by which point…

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