Introducing
Hot Pub Time Machine

Hot Pub Time Machine is the first project in this section. It is a public history of nightlife in and around Newbury.

Pick a year and the map shows the houses that were trading then. Open a pub and you get the names that building has used, the evidence for those dates, and a photograph beside the name when we are allowed to show one. Lost pubs sit next to the ones that are still open.

We built it because the history is real and scattered. A coaching inn, a 1960s directory, a CAMRA note and a memory of a night out all describe the same street, but they rarely sit on one page. The product puts them on one map, with the dates labelled as carefully as the sources allow.

It is live at addbox.co.uk/pubexplorer.

What you can do

• Move through the years and watch the map change.
• Open a town directory, or a decade, and see which pubs belong there.
• Read a pub: its names, a short history, key dates, and the sources behind them.
• Follow “other names” when one building has traded under several signs.
• Look at the street as it is today, next to the historical record.
• Add a memory of a night out, or a fact with a source, for the people keeping the catalogue.

A timeline for each town lays the same history out as cards: first recorded, opened, renamed, reopened, closed. The whole card links to the pub, not only the name.

How a pub is recorded

A building and a trading name are not the same thing. One address on Bartholomew Street has been the Bricklayers Arms, William the Fourth, the Rat and Parrot and The Newbury. Each of those is its own period. The page for the address lists them. The page for each name tells that name’s story.

A directory, a census, a map or a photograph proves that a pub existed in that year. It does not prove the year the pub opened, and silence in the records is not a closing date. When the catalogue only has a first listing, the label says “First recorded”. When a start is an estimate, it says so. A later reopening is a reopening, not the original opening.

Photographs are shown only when we have the right to serve the file. A picture on someone else’s website can be cited. It is not copied onto ours.

Where it covers

Newbury is the deepest catalogue. The same map also covers Thatcham, Hungerford, Lambourn, Compton, East Ilsley, Hampstead Norreys, Hermitage and Beedon World’s End. Current venues began from OpenStreetMap. The older names come from trade directories, census transcriptions, PubWiki, CAMRA, Closed Pubs and the local newspaper.

The tech stack

The app lives in the same repository as this website, as a pnpm workspace package. The public site is TypeScript from the pages down to the date rules.

• Next.js 15 and React 19. Pages are rendered on the server. Every pub, place, street and year has its own URL, so a record can be shared and indexed.
• Tailwind CSS 4. The interface is a warm, readable record: a hero, a timeline, and a map, rather than a dashboard.
• MapLibre GL. The map is drawn in the browser. The basemap can come from MapTiler, and falls back to OpenFreeMap when that key is not set.
• PostgreSQL and PostGIS, on Supabase. Each place is a geography point. That is what puts a pub on the map and keeps two houses on the same street distinct.
• SQL migrations. A correction to a date or a name is a reviewed migration. The catalogue is not a pile of one-off edits.
• A separate rules layer. TypeScript decides what a fact is allowed to claim: which name represents a building in the directory, which pubs belong on a given year, and when a label should say “First recorded” instead of “Opened”. Those rules have tests. The database stores the evidence. The rules stop the evidence being overstated.
• Sharp for image processing, and Google Street View for the building as it looks now. Historical photographs stay separate from that modern view.

Local development can run on fixture data, with no database. Production reads Supabase. The same domain code sits in front of both, so a label change can be tested before it touches the live catalogue.

How it is hosted

This marketing site is static files on Firebase Hosting. Hot Pub Time Machine is the Next.js app, server-rendered on Cloud Run in London (europe-west2). Hosting on addbox.co.uk rewrites /pubexplorer to that service, so the address stays on the Addbox domain. A dedicated host, hotpubtimemachine.web.app, sends people to the same place.

That split is deliberate. The brochure site stays simple. The product can have a database, a map and a URL for every pub, without becoming a second website with a second brand.