Pubs from books

George Orwell's London pubs

George Orwell, 1903 to 1950 · Every pub on this page was open and serving when we last checked (August 2026)

Orwell drank at the Newman Arms while working at the BBC around the corner, and it stayed with him. It appears in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, then again, transformed, as the prole pub in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Winston Smith goes looking for someone who remembers life before the Party.

Orwell also wrote the most famous description of a pub that never existed: The Moon Under Water, his 1946 essay on the perfect local. The Newman Arms is the closest you can get to drinking in his imagination.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

“You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?”

An old prole at the bar, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 1, Chapter 8

The Newman Arms

Fitzrovia · 23 Rathbone Street

The model for the prole pub where an old man argues with the barman about pints and half-litres, and Winston learns that the past is already out of reach. The real pub dates from 1730, hides up a narrow passage, and is small enough that Orwell's cramped, beery scene writes itself.

It has had spells of closure and new owners over the years, most recently reopening in 2025 after a refurbishment, so it remains open, serving, and recognisably the same tiny room.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

The Newman Arms appears here too, more than a decade before Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gordon Comstock's Fitzrovia is Orwell's own: the same streets, the same pubs, the same shortage of money for beer.

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.)
  • Arthur Conan Doyle (One Bloomsbury pub opposite the British Museum, disguised as the Alpha Inn in a Sherlock Holmes case.)
  • 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.

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