Arthur Conan Doyle's London pubs
Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859 to 1930 · Every pub on this page was open and serving when we last checked (August 2026)
In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, Holmes traces a stolen gem through the crop of a Christmas goose, and the trail runs through a small public house near the British Museum: the Alpha Inn, whose landlord runs the goose club that started it all.
The Museum Tavern, directly opposite the museum gates, is the accepted model. Conan Doyle drank here, and the Victorian interior still fits the story.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892)
“Your beer should be excellent if it is as good as your geese.”
The Museum Tavern
Bloomsbury, opposite the British Museum · 49 Great Russell Street, WC1B 3BA
Conan Doyle describes the Alpha Inn as a small public-house at the corner of one of the streets which runs down into Holborn, which fits this 1723 pub opposite the museum gates. Holmes and Watson stop in for two glasses of beer and a word with the landlord about his goose club.
It's the natural first pint after a day in the museum, which is exactly how most people find it.
More authors, more pubs
- Charles Dickens (Four pubs across four novels, from a galleried Southwark coaching inn to a narrow riverside tavern in Limehouse.)
- Bram Stoker (One pub on the edge of Hampstead Heath, caught up in the hunt for a vampire in Dracula.)
- George Orwell (One tiny Fitzrovia pub that served as the prole pub in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and turned up in Keep the Aspidistra Flying first.)
- Graham Greene (One Clapham Common pub, disguised as the Pontefract Arms in The End of the Affair.)
- A. P. Herbert (One 17th-century riverside pub at Hammersmith, lightly disguised as The Pigeons in The Water Gipsies.)
- Samuel Pepys (One Bankside tavern, by tradition the alehouse where Pepys watched the Great Fire consume London.)
If any of these pubs surprises you at the card machine, file a report. If they get it right, nominate them for the Hall of Saints.