Graham Greene's London pubs
Graham Greene, 1904 to 1991 · Every pub on this page was open and serving when we last checked (August 2026)
Greene lived at 14 Clapham Common North Side until the Blitz destroyed the house, and he set The End of the Affair on the common he knew: Bendrix on the south side, Sarah and Henry Miles on the north, and the Pontefract Arms in between.
The pub behind the disguise is The Windmill, sitting out on the common itself. The novel opens in earnest with Bendrix steering Henry into its public bar on a rain-lashed January night, and the walk across the common to reach it is still the best way to arrive.
The End of the Affair (1951)
Greene's work is still in copyright, so no quotation here: but the Pontefract Arms is where the novel begins in earnest, with Bendrix and Henry Miles drinking in the public bar while the rain comes down outside. Read the opening chapter and you'll want the same table.
The Windmill
Clapham Common · Clapham Common South Side, SW4 9DE
A big Young's pub standing on the common itself, and the accepted model for the Pontefract Arms. Greene's own bombed house on the North Side became the Miles's house in the novel, and the pub sits between the two lovers' homes exactly as the fiction demands.
It's grown grander than Bendrix's public bar, with dining rooms and hotel bedrooms these days, but a pint by the window when the rain is sweeping the common still puts you inside the book.
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.)
- 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.)
- 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.