Pub Crawl

London Pub Crawl Walking Tour
London

From the Fleet Street haunt of Dickens and Dr Johnson to the Soho pub where de Gaulle broadcast to occupied France, thirty pubs that made London's literary and cinematic history.

29 stops · Various London locations

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Every Stop Has a Story

The George Inn

Dickens name-checked this inn directly in Little Dorrit, and today it's cared for by the National Trust, the last galleried coaching inn left in London.

The Globe Tavern

The window above this pub is where Bridget sang 'All By Myself' into a hairbrush in the 2001 film, on a market that's operated on or near this spot for over a thousand years.

The Anchor Bankside

Samuel Pepys is said to have watched the Great Fire of London from this riverside spot in 1666, over three centuries before the pub appeared in the opening sequences of Mission: Impossible.

The Old Thameside Inn

This pub sits beside the ruins of the actual Clink Prison, the jail that gave us the phrase 'in the clink,' destroyed in the Gordon Riots of 1780.

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

Dr Johnson, Dickens, Tennyson, Voltaire, Mark Twain, and Arthur Conan Doyle all drank in this pub's warren of small dark bars, built over old monastic cellars.

The Princess Louise

Every mirror, tile, and painted ceiling in this pub is original to its 1891 refit, kept unchanged for over a century by the notoriously secretive Yorkshire brewery that owns it.

The Seven Stars

This tiny pub has survived since 1602, one of the few in London to make it through the Great Fire completely intact.

The Ship Tavern

Dickens was a regular here during his Covent Garden years, on a street whose narrow 17th-century proportions have barely changed since.

The Lamb and Flag

Poet John Dryden was ambushed and beaten by hired thugs in the alley outside this pub in 1679, allegedly on the orders of the Earl of Rochester over a satirical poem.

The Salisbury

This pub served as the exterior in Peep Show's establishing shots, its cut-glass mirrors and cast-iron columns all original to its 1898 refit.

Mr Fogg's Tavern

This immersive tavern is named for Phileas Fogg, the fictional adventurer who made his famous eighty-day wager at the Reform Club, just a short walk away on Pall Mall.

The Dog and Duck

George Orwell drank here as part of a bohemian pub circuit that stretched between the French House and the Fitzroy Tavern, inside a tiny Victorian corner barely changed in a century.

The Coach and Horses

Journalist Jeffrey Bernard drank himself into legend at this pub over decades, a dissolution later dramatised in the play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.

The French House

Dylan Thomas once left the entire manuscript of Under Milk Wood under a seat here and had to be telephoned to come back and retrieve it.

The Newman Arms

This tiny pub is believed to have inspired the low-ceilinged 'prole pub' in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Winston Smith retreats into an older, freer London.

The Fitzroy Tavern

The entire neighbourhood of Fitzrovia is named after this pub, whose muralled back room hosted Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, and the rest of London's bohemian writers from the 1920s through the 1950s.

The Old Queen's Head

This pub's carved fireplace was allegedly salvaged from Sir Walter Raleigh's own Chelsea house, inside a Tudor-style interior later used for interior filming in the BBC's Silent Witness.

The Bar with No Name

This unmarked bar has no sign above the door at all; you find it only by knowing it's there, or by following someone who does.

The Dublin Castle

Madness played this tiny back-room stage repeatedly in the late 1970s before anyone outside Camden knew their name, followed later by early shows from Blur, Radiohead, and Amy Winehouse.

The World's End

This real Camden pub shares its name with the fictional pub at the heart of Edgar Wright's 2013 film, the final part of his Cornetto trilogy, and has been a fixture of the neighbourhood through musical eras from punk to Britpop.

The Pineapple

This unpretentious Kentish Town local achieved a strange kind of fame as the pub exterior in Spaced, the sitcom that launched Edgar Wright's entire comic sensibility.

The Spaniards Inn

Dick Turpin is said to have stabled his horse Black Bess here, and Bram Stoker had the characters of Dracula take tea on this same lawn in one of the novel's gentler passages.

The Ten Bells

At least two of Jack the Ripper's victims, Mary Kelly and Annie Chapman, were seen drinking here shortly before their murders in the autumn of 1888.

The Blind Beggar

Ronnie Kray shot rival gangster George Cornell dead here in 1966 while the jukebox played 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore.'

The Captain Kidd

This pub is named for William Kidd, hanged nearby in 1701 and left suspended in a gibbet over the Thames, though whether he was a genuine pirate or an unlucky privateer betrayed by powerful political interests has never been resolved.

The Grapes

This pub inspired Dickens's description of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, and today is part-owned by actor Ian McKellen.

The Cross Keys

Agatha Christie visited this tucked-away pub during her years living in Chelsea, part of the King's Road social fabric that runs quietly through her writing about English domestic life.

The Old Ship

This riverside pub's weathered facade served as the exterior for New Tricks, standing on a stretch of the Thames that's been inhabited since Roman times.

The Prince's Head

This is the real pub behind Ted Lasso's fictional Crown and Anchor, still supplied today by Fuller's brewery just a few miles upriver in Chiswick.

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