Watching The U.K. Election Unfold From A London Pub

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T he floor is sticky. The room is hot and stuffy. Bodies swim past each other, spilling pints along the way. The smell of stale ale floats in the air. The bartenders at this North London pub look bored, while patrons buzz with anticipation, eyes glued to the giant projection screen airing a live BBC broadcast. It's the evening of July 4 and the United Kingdom's general election is drawing to a close. In a matter of hours, the country will have a new Prime Minister after 14 years of Conservative Party rule. For now, however, those gathered inside this establishment retain their composure, steadily counting the hours until polls close at 10 p.m.

In a corner upstairs, a 26-year-old economist named Rory Fennessey is squatting on the floor with a set of colored pencils and a hex map of the U.K., ready to fill all 650 parliamentary constituencies when the results start trickling in. "It's just a fun little thing to do," he says. "Maybe I'll frame it after the election."

Fennessey believes the first-past-the-post system used in U.K. general elections—where the candidate with the most votes in each constituency becomes the MP, winning seats for their party regardless of whether that party gets a majority of the overall votes cast—is a "really, really bad electoral system." But it makes analysis "really, really interesting," he says, "because depending on which constituencies swing which way, you can really change the outcome of the election."