A Day from London: One-Day Travel Reach across Great Britain in 1750, the 1830s, 1850, 1910 and Today, from a Calibrated Historical Network Model

How much of Great Britain lay within a day's travel of London, and how did that change between the coaching era and today? I build a multimodal network model on a 2 km grid for five dates (1750, the 1830s, 1850, 1910 and today) from historical GIS of the turnpike roads of England and Wales and the railways of 1851, a reconstruction of the 1910 rail network, and OpenStreetMap. Coach speeds are fitted to scheduled times of London coach services in 1836 (136 destinations) and to twelve cited journeys of 1739 to 1764; train speeds come from published averages; every era is tested on journeys it was not fitted to. The 1830s model reproduces the 1837 mail-coach timetable with a median absolute error of 12%. The 1750 model fails the error threshold set in advance (28% against 25%), so its map is a rough sketch. The 1850 and 1910 models use average train speeds and are slower than documented expresses by a median 46% and 34%, on four and six journeys, so their areas are lower bounds. Leaving Charing Cross at dawn, twelve hours of travel reached 5% of Great Britain's land in 1750, 19% in the 1830s, at least 47% in 1850, at least 72% in 1910 and 97% today. The largest gain per year came between the 1830s and 1850, when the first railways multiplied the area within a day by at least 2.5 in about fifteen years. The surfaces and code are released for reuse.

Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/day-from-london/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/day-from-london. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/day-from-london/.

Sources: turnpike roads and London coach services of 1819 and 1836 (Rosevear, Bogart, Shaw-Taylor and Satchell, openICPSR 195126 and 195128; derived results only); 1851 England, Wales and Scotland rail lines (Satchell et al., UK Data Service ReShare SN 852991, CC BY 4.0); OpenStreetMap contributors via OpenFreeMap (ODbL); train speeds from Leunig (2006). Text, figures and derived data CC BY 4.0; code MIT.