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The best pubs in London: the interiors the Campaign for Real Ale has put on its national inventory, the last galleried coaching inn, the pubs where something documented happened, and the ones that do a single thing better than anyone. Filter by kind, or by what's open now.
The long readA History of the London Pub20 minSix Victorian champions in stained glass, and one of the few surviving snob screens in London.
Historic interiorNotable building
The building is a corner pub of about 1860 to 1870, gault brick with stucco dressings and what Historic England calls lively classical detailing, and the thing to look up at before going in is the cast-iron lamp bracket on the corner: a great curl of scrolled ironwork carrying a lantern out over the pavement.
The glass is newer than it looks. Samuel Smith's bought the pub in the 1980s and commissioned Ann Sotheran to fill the ground-floor windows with figures, and they are the champions the pub is named for: Captain Webb, who swam the Channel; the jockey Fred Archer; the boxer Bob Fitzsimmons; W. G. Grace; Young Tom Morris, with his golf clubs; and the tennis player William Renshaw. The same six are painted on the sign outside.
Inside, part of the Victorian fitting survives, including a snob screen - the little glazed panels on swivels set along the top of the bar, which let the people in the better room order a drink without being looked at by the staff or by anyone in the public bar. Almost all of them were taken out in the twentieth century. A 1950s refitting by John Robson Reid and Sylvia Reid, after a competition run by the Architectural Review, is part of what is there now.
Outside tables
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