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The Blackfriar

A wedge-shaped pub of 1875 fitted out in marble and bronze with jolly monks doing the moralising.

Historic interior

Also in Architecture.

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.

Where
174 Queen Victoria Street, EC4V 4EG
Nearest station
Blackfriars · 1 min walk

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Photo by It's No Game, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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