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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
A wedge-shaped pub of 1875 fitted out in marble and bronze with jolly monks doing the moralising.
OdditiesVictorian & EdwardianYou can go insideFree
It stands on the site of a Dominican friary - the black friars the district is named after - and the pub itself, put up around 1875, is an ordinary enough building on an awkward wedge of ground. What happened to the inside is not ordinary. Around 1905 Herbert Fuller-Clark remodelled it with the sculptors Frederick Callcott and Henry Poole in coloured marble, mosaic and bronze, and filled it with fat, cheerful monks going about monastic business under mottoes like Finery is Foolery and Haste is Slow. The barrel-vaulted back room, added later, is the best of it. The 1960s nearly took the lot; a campaign led by John Betjeman stopped them.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.