Samuel Pepys's London pubs
Samuel Pepys, 1633 to 1703 · Every pub on this page was open and serving when we last checked (August 2026)
Pepys's diary is the greatest eyewitness account of 17th-century London, and its most famous entry was written from the south bank of the Thames on 2 September 1666, as the Great Fire tore through the City opposite.
Tradition places his little ale-house on the site of The Anchor at Bankside, the last survivor of the riverside taverns of Shakespeare's Southwark.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1660 to 1669)
“We to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow.”
The Anchor
Bankside, Southwark · 34 Park Street, SE1 9EF
Tradition places Pepys's little ale-house here, on the site of the last remaining riverside tavern from the era when Shakespeare's Globe stood a few yards inland. The current building went up in 1676, after Southwark's own fire.
It's big and busy with tourists these days, but the terrace view across the Thames to St Paul's, the cathedral built because of the fire Pepys watched, earns its place in this guide.
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.)
- 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.)
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.