The London Pubs Guide 2024

Seven of London’s finest

Despite the proclamations of Woke scribblers on the death of London’s nightlife, the pubs remain a hugely redeeming feature of the city. Sure, to an unadventurous transplant, the £7.30 pint in a Westminster Greene King pub designed for Chinese tourists can seem unappealing, but this is more a failure of the patron’s choice of establishment than our stock of drinking holes. The best pubs in our city are not found where footfall is highest but are tucked away down side streets, with unchanging staff and a cast of regulars that keep the place ticking over during the day. So, if you have often found yourself paying a fortune to drink in a restaurant with no pool table, jukebox, or quiz machine, consider venturing further afield and trying a proper pub. None of these will charge more than £6 a pint, and most are much cheaper than that.

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The Bancroft Arms E1

The last holdout of the cockney in Stepney Green. The Bancroft Arms was founded in the 1930s as a Truman, Hanbury & Buxton & Co. pub, part of that brewery’s empire, the signs of which still hang above many of London’s newer chain pubs or hipsterish coffee shops on Brick Lane. On the corner of Mile End Road and Hartford Street, the pub sits next to an enormous council estate, in a census area that is 8.5% White British and 61.4% Bangladeshi. The sign next to the door reads ‘The Only Pub They Couldn’t Shut’, as most of its brethren did not survive the overwhelming influx of Bengalis into the area, given their unwillingness to drink Kronenburg. As such, the pub remains one of the last examples of a cockney pub in inner east London.

Queen Mary University is directly across the street, but I have never seen a student in the pub. They mostly prefer the Wetherspoons down the road, probably because it is cheaper, possibly because they get the sense that the Bancroft isn’t really for them.

It isn’t all history and demographics: it is also a good place to drink. Though it lacks a pool table, it does possess a London Fives dartboard, which is a variant of the game almost exclusively played by cockneys. I would emphasise that I have never seen a dartboard of this variety in any other pub in London, so its persistence is a great sign of the commitment of the regulars to the place. After all, why else would you have something on the wall that, in all likelihood, only a few hundred people in the area know how to use anymore?

The pub has one of the funniest beer gardens in London, consisting of: 1 table, 4 metal chairs, a giant ashtray, some astroturf, and a jumbo aircon unit — which is all accessed via the door to the women’s toilets. Whilst it would be a stretch to call it atmospheric, it is a cosy place to occupy for a few hours with a group of smokers. Its confined nature means that it is quite social, in that it makes it hard to avoid chatting with anyone else having a cigarette.

My favourite night here was the evening of the substantial meals. The pub has no kitchen, so in a bid to eke some cash out during lockdown, pukka pies and beans were ferried down from the upstairs flat to accompany eight pints of lager. The rules about not ordering at the bar were immediately discarded by the regulars and the smoking area was at the capacity of a tube station lift.

The Faltering Fullback N4

Yer Bird knows a cute beer garden in Finsbury Park. Unfortunately, this time, Yer Bird has a point. Unlike almost every other pub on this list, you can bring women here and they will not complain. Indeed, unlike literally every other pub on this list, small groups of women often come here of their own accord. Even the staff look young and vaguely eugenic.

The pub comes in three sections. The front bar is a relatively small, traditional-looking boozer with one TV. The back of the inside is a high-ceilinged hall filled with picnic tables pointed towards two TV screens with a kitchen hatch for ordering off to one side. The garden is behind this hall and is the nicest pub garden in London. It starts as a small smoking area, then climbs four storeys along two staircases, with much of it being high enough to catch the sun in summer while still having ample cover and heaters to make it viable in winter.

It is a classic Irish front-of-house, Thai back-of-house pub — an arrangement usually born of an Irish publican’s intercontinental marriage — with a range of curries that you can order from the hatch. The food has been Woked up a bit recently, with the old sub-£10 mains giving way to a slightly Madrified £12-14 menu. Nonetheless, the choices are few and uncompromising. Nobody could fairly accuse them of taking a gastro route given that they won’t take bookings, explain the menu (it’s Thai food you moron), or take an order from a table. Given that most pubs that serve food are now restaurants, or want to charge £17 for ‘The Burger’, it is nice to get a relatively cheap and cheerful portion when you have forgotten to eat before going out.

The Fullback excels when there is live sport on. The lack of bookings means you need to arrive very early to get a seat, but a good atmosphere is a certainty, whether it is snooker, darts, cricket, etc. This is even true early in the day, with the pub being strangely popular with Australians that come in to watch Aussie Rules. Unfortunately, being in Finsbury Park, it is an Arsenal pub.

Despite being the only normie pub on the list, it does not compromise much on price, with a Heineken coming in at £5.50.

The Pride of Pimlico SW1

A Craft Union Free House. Craft Union is a chain where the business model is to slash the prices, round up all the local daytime alcoholics, then give them a pool table, Sky Sports, and a slot machine. While you have to pay a little more than at Tim Martin’s chain, the air of death present in a daytime ’spoons is alleviated by the playing of pool and darts indicating that the old boys are still capable of doing more than walking to the bar and back five times a day. In London you tend to find them near, but not on, council estates, as these contain the heritage Londoners that support cheap, uncompromising boozers. Given their clientele, they are always a good place to watch football and horse racing, with ample screen provision and management amenable to turning the music off and putting the sound on.

Anyway, on November 11th 2023, this formula made the pub the most convenient location for a nationalist riot to emerge. With a Palestine march being permitted on Remembrance Day, a group of a few hundred hooligans decided that they would congregate near the route of the march at the cheapest nearby pub — because English street movements are completely incapable of doing anything without turning the nearest pub into a fortress. With the protesters being sent over Vauxhall Bridge Road toward the American Embassy, this made the Pride a good location to congregate, with a view to voicing opposition to the vast crowds of foreigners marching through the streets on Remembrance Day. As I wandered down Tachbrook Street, genuinely unaware of what was going on, hoping to watch the football, I found a hundred of them locked inside the pub, surrounded by police. They were subsequently nicked, sent to Bethnal Green to be detained for a few hours, and then released without charge. This may have little bearing on your experience of the place, but I always like a pub with a bit of history.

Pool is free on weekdays.

Boston Arms N19

Conveniently located opposite Tufnell Park Underground Station, the Boston Arms is nestled in a Victorian building bearing its name. You should aim to get there before the end of happy hour at 6pm as the drinks are 20% off, bringing a Guinness down to a very reasonable £4.30. (FischerKing advises that you should purchase two before the hour turns.) Inside, there are two pool tables, both in surprisingly good condition. Usually in our sort of pubs, the pool table is crooked and worn out after years of abuse. This has its charm, much like how a great part of baseball is that the distance for a home run is always different depending on the stadium you are at, but occasionally it is nice to not have your black curve halfway across the table.

The locals do adhere to an annoyingly rigid winner-stays-on system, but with a second table, you’ll usually not have to play every game against Irish 50-somethings with 100,000 games under their belt.

Behind the pool tables is a bit of wasted space with a dartboard. It’s common in our favoured pubs that inefficient management leads to floor space being given over to a furniture dump that nobody wishes to do anything about. This is probably why they will all be closed in twenty years when the council-housed whites that keep them alive die.

The garden is a bizarrely large (yet unadvertised) asphalt goods yard that nonetheless has a television. This makes it particularly good for watching the cricket in the summer as nobody will bother you as you sit at a picnic table in a parking lot.

Commercial pubs nowadays tend to be stripping out their quaint old furniture in favour of uncomfortable high tables that maximise the seat-to-floor space ratio, as though the customer is some sort of slave to be squished efficiently into a cargo hold. The Boston Arms eschews this trend with big comfortable armchairs and sofas, accompanied by ratty blankets, making it a charming place to lounge around.

The Grosvenor SW1

Pimlico’s finest pub is a few hundred yards west of the north side of Vauxhall Bridge. The Grosvenor serves as the estate pub for the council housing built on the south side of Pimlico. The interior is a cosy scene with a red carpet bearing the fleur-de-lis wrapping the horseshoe bar, continuing back to the fireplace to the right of the bar and to the pool table to the left. In winter, they are diligent enough to keep the fireplace running, meaning the place never gets cold — unless a patron is lackadaisical about closing the door, which is the source of roughly half of the fights seen there. Three bay windows jut out onto the front porch which catches the sun in the summer months. The back garden is small and has comfy old sofas, but is north-facing and covered, making it slightly disappointing when the sun is out.

The whole pub has something of a naval theme. A dramatic scene of ships engulfed by a storm is painted above the length of the bar and the other walls bare the adverts (likely replicas) of the Peninsular Navigation Co., the White Star Line, and the Thames Trading Co. There are three model ships in the pub, the most impressive of which being the replica of the Spanish Galleon ‘The Half Moon’, which sits in a glass case against the righthand wall of the building.

It is particularly good that it is cheap, easy to get a seat, is not beset by commuters, and is in Zone 1, making it the perfect place for geographically dispersed London grad workers to congregate for a pint.

Hole in the Wall SE1

Waterloo Station is the terminus for the well-to-do citizens of Surrey, chuntering in aboard dilapidated South Western Rail stock, on their way to keep the country’s economy afloat and its welfare claimants fed. In return for their dismal commutes, they are rewarded with the best station pub in Britain. As you exit your train, look not to the appalling station bar that overlooks the platforms, or the hideous Brewdog adult playground that lurks in ‘the Sidings’ (a completely fictional place name). Stroll past the Windrush memorial, and down to the Hole in the Wall under the railway arches.

There is a genuinely impressive selection of beers on tap, twenty-one at my last count, with prices kept between £5-6. During their recent refurbishment, there was much concern that this affordable arrangement was about to be taken from us via an acquisition but, much to the delight of the good people of Surrey, the HITW re-opened in two weeks with little more than a fresh coat of paint and the same low prices.

There are two TVs, one of which works (inside) and one of which does not (outside). While they occasionally clear the tables out for standing room for the rugby, by and large it is not used as a sports pub, with the jukebox being allowed to control the audio of the establishment. The tastes of the customers mean that the atmosphere is a slice of 1995, with Oasis and Blur humming along as patrons rush in and out for a quick one when their trains are delayed.

There is a small front bar, a large beer hall, and a small garden for smokers. You will not get a seat when you enter, but tables turn quickly as half the patrons are only there for a twenty minute pint while their delayed train rumbles into position over the roof of the pub.

Rose and Crown SW1

The Rose and Crown is the archetype of the sort of pub we appreciate. On the corner of Turk’s Row and Lower Sloane Street, the exterior of the pub boasts well-kept flower beds in the windows, overlooking picnic tables that give you a pleasant view of the well-to-do West Londoners going about their day on a sunny afternoon. As is so often the case in a proper London pub, the bar seems perpetually staffed by the same characters. In this case, a short and friendly English fellow, and a lanky (I assume) Slavic man with a terse demeanour.

An amusing quirk of buying from either of these fellows is that a £1 is routinely added to the price of your beer when paying by card only to be returned to you in shrapnel. I won’t speculate on what they are up to there, but it is useful to keep the change on hand for the pool table or the jukebox. Truth be told, the pool table has seen better days and is very unforgiving on the cushions. The jukebox controls the pub atmosphere, which is a nice change to the deafening tunes forced upon many boozers nowadays. It can be a nuisance on a quiet afternoon though, given that it is never unplugged, as punters may foist their preferred noise upon you while you try to have a quiet pint. In the toilets you can see evidence of our sort of people, with questionable Chelsea and Millwall stickers adorning the cisterns, most half ripped off but with their original forms still recognisable. There are less than twenty seats inside, so get in early if you are going on a weekend.

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Tomorrow belongs to us, TWKK.