geoffrey fletcher Archives - Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

Geoffrey Fletcher’s favourite London pubs, 1966

In a small booklet called Offbeat in London, published in 1966, writer and illustrator Geoffrey Fletcher provided a list of his favourite London pubs.

Fletcher’s list is unusual and interesting for various reasons.

He knew a lot about architecture but wasn’t an architectural critic in the formal sense.

Nor was he a beer geek. In fact, he rarely mentions drink at all.

What really mattered to him was the vibe. In particular, he loved anything that felt like a relic of times past.

His books often focus on ghost signs, buildings that had dodged demolition and elderly people who remembered Queen Victoria.

Pubs, many of which were built in the high Victorian period, were one more aspect of this.

The pub list in Offbeat in London comes after a description of Henekey’s, “the sole representative of the vanished gin palace of Victorian London”. (It’s now a Sam Smith’s pub called The Citties of Yorke.) After notes on its fixtures and fittings, such as “the famous Waterloo stove”, Fletcher writes:

Having made a digression in the direction of refreshment, I take the opportunity to introduce a short list of my favourite London pubs, recommended for architecture and atmosphere, as well as for food and drink.

Here’s his list, with a brief quote from the more extensive notes in the book for each entry.

The Salisbury | St Martin’s Lane, WC2 | “You go through the doors and find yourself at once in the London of Beardsley and Wilde.” | still trading
The Red Lion | Duke of York Street, SW1 | “a perfect hall of mirrors, quite untouched since the Victorian age” | still trading
The Albert | Victoria Street, SW1 | “a curiously American-like exterior with superb balconies” | still trading
The Jolly Butchers | Stoke Newington | “fantastic Gothic ironwork” | still trading
The Crown | Aberdeen Place, NW8 | “The interior has a strong flavour of the Diamond Jubilee about it…” | now a Lebanese restaurant but well preserved
The Black Friar | Queen Victoria Street EC4 | “the most remarkable Arts and Crafts period pub in London” | still trading
Mooney’s Irish House | Strand, EC4 | “Upright drinking, talk, stout, Irish whiskeys and crab sandwiches…” | ~~now The Tipperary, temporarily closed~~ was at 395 Strand, now closed (see correction in comments)
The Nell Gwynn(e) | Bull Yard, WC2 | “Porter on draught… was sold here until only a few years ago.” | still trading
The Final | William IV Street, WC2 | “a pile of turned mahogany, gold lettered mirrors and stained glass” | gone, we think
The Paxton’s Head | Knightsbridge, SW1 | “the name is derived… from the designer of the Crystal Palace” | still trading

It’s interesting how many of these are still trading and retain some or all of the features that made Fletcher love them.

The Final, on the edge of Covent Garden, is the only one that seems to have completely disappeared. It’s not listed in any of the other ‘great London pubs’ books on our shelves, either.

So, with that in mind, let’s have a slightly extended quote:

The saloon has a mosaic floor Street to cool your feet, and a brass rail to rest them on when you are called to the bar… Best of all, perhaps, is the Schweppes advert for Soda Water and Dry Ginger Ale, with an Edwardian nymph, an Albert Moore-like figure, at a spring. Watching her from the opposite wall is a group of natty, whiskery gents in titfers, with the day’s shoot at their feet.

It turns out, however, that Fletcher wrote about The Final in a couple of other places. We don’t have a copy of London by Night but we do have Geoffrey Fletcher’s London from 1968 in which he recycles a chunk of the note above, adding that he rates it “almost as highly as Mooney’s”.

How interesting, and how sad, that a beautiful Victorian pub can completely disappear, not only physically, but also from the collective memory.

Thank goodness for Big Geoff F. and his eye for nostalgic detail.

Geoffrey Fletcher on Victorian Pubs, 1962

Geoffrey Fletcher (1923-2004) wrote and illustrated a lot of books – observations of the unglamorous end of London life, from pie shops to street markets.

His most famous book is The London Nobody Knows, published in 1962 and the basis of a cult documentary from 1969.

We’d previously only read it in libraries but finally got our own copy last weekend – a 1965 Penguin edition that cost £2.50.

Though most of Fletcher’s books mention pubs in passing – we quoted a couple in 20th Century Pub – it’s in chapter eight of The London Nobody Knows that he really sets out his manifesto:

One of the striking characteristics of London pubs is the way in which different pubs have an appeal to different kinds of patrons.

To underline his point he goes on to list various types of pub, from legal pubs to “homosexuals’ pubs… where queers meet queers”.

Like Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Roddy Gradidge and other contemporaries, Fletcher believed that Victorian pubs were the pinnacle of the form:

London pubs are rich in the trappings of the Victorian age, which knew exactly how a town pub should appear. A fine one is illustrated here – the King and Queen in the Harrow Road. This is nineteenth-century Baroque at its most florid. Grey marble columns riser from a mosaic floor, raised a step above the pavement. There is splendid ironwork – iron letters and wrought iron – over the door. The words ‘Saloon Bar’ have a bucolic abandon… The architects of the late Victorian pubs and music-halls knew exactly what the situation demanded – extravagance, exuberance, and plenty of decoration for its own sake.

The King and Queen, Harrow Road, as drawn by Geoffrey Fletcher.

Other pubs Fletcher mentions by name as good examples include the Lamb in Leadenhall market (still worth stopping to look at today), the Black Friar at Blackfriars, and the Crown on Cunningham Place, St John’s Wood/Maida Vale. The latter is still there, apparently with a nicely preserved interior, but as a gastropub/bistro called, for some reason, ‘Crocker’s Folly’. Fletcher also provides drawings of The Lamb and The Black Friar.

Beyond fixtures and fittings, Fletcher has views on pub culture, too:

Although… the East End is losing some of its strongly focal character, the old life of the pubs in those parts of London still persists. A weekend pub crawl in such places as Shoreditch, Stepney, and Hackney is the way to see it at first hand. Here the East End ‘ma’ continues to flourish, the large sized, perhaps even pneumatic specimen who was no stranger to Phil May and Albert Chevalier, joins in the chorus, supported at the bar by a buttoned horsehair seat and at the front by a large Guinness. Such period characters must disappear sometime – that is where the funeral parlour comes in; if so, however, they are at once replaced by replicas, presumably on a system known only to the East End.

That’s yet more evidence of the link between women and stout, by the way, which we’ll file away for future reference.

You can find copies of The London Nobody Knows knocking around in second-hand book shops or online, or there’s a fairly recent reprint and eBook edition from the History Press, with a foreword by Dan Cruikshank.