Bram Stoker's London pubs
Bram Stoker, 1847 to 1912 · Every pub on this page was open and serving when we last checked (August 2026)
Stoker set the eeriest chapters of Dracula not in Transylvania but in Hampstead, where the undead Lucy Westenra stalks the Heath. The Spaniards Inn, already old when the novel was written, anchors the scene in a real place his readers knew.
It's the perfect book to pair with a dusk walk across the Heath, finishing at the pub as the light goes.
Dracula (1897)
“By good chance we got a cab near the 'Spaniards,' and drove to town.”
The Spaniards Inn
Hampstead Heath · Spaniards Road, NW3 7JJ
After a grim night investigating Lucy's tomb in the Hampstead churchyard, Dr Seward and Van Helsing find a cab by the Spaniards and escape back to town. The inn, on its 1585 site at the top of the Heath, still looks the part: low ceilings, dark wood, and a toll house narrowing the road outside.
Dickens got here first, sending Mrs Bardell's tea party to the Spaniards Gardens in The Pickwick Papers, so one visit ticks off two classics.
More authors, more pubs
- Charles Dickens (Four pubs across four novels, from a galleried Southwark coaching inn to a narrow riverside tavern in Limehouse.)
- Arthur Conan Doyle (One Bloomsbury pub opposite the British Museum, disguised as the Alpha Inn in a Sherlock Holmes case.)
- 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.