East End Pubs

A new book about East London boozers has got me all nostalgic. I'm wellin' up!

Ever since I was allowed into pubs I’ve always wanted to be a local. The closest I’ve come was at a pub in Bethnal Green called The Hare. One day I came in with my younger brother and he ordered two pints of Greene King IPA and the barmaid, Maceili, corrected him and said ‘he drinks Landlord.’ A proud moment. After our first daughter was born, we’d take her to The Hare in her car seat, something about the warmth and hubbub seemed to soothe her. The Cockney ladies would pass her around and coo at her. As she was born in Homerton hospital, they said that she was one of them, not like us.There were memorable characters like Brett who my wife and I dubbed ‘the king of the pub’. He was a fearsome looking man with a shaved head and a ringtone that played ‘Mr Big Stuff’ but it was usually just his mum calling to ask when he’d be home for his tea. One afternoon someone asked him what he was having and he said: “salad, salad! Last time I had salad I got attacked by a fucking fox.”

I spent most of my 20s in pubs in the East End of London so a new book called East End Pubs by the superbly-named Alistair Von Lion with photographs by Tim George brought back some fond memories. I moved to the area in 2001, a council flat in Aldgate, when there were still lots of proper old boozers that hadn’t been gentrified or turned into flats. Some of them were astonishingly lawless, certainly compared with the pubs I was used to in leafy Bucks. Everyone still smoked in The Buhola¹ in Bethnal Green Road, an Irish pub not in this book, until well into the 2010s. The drug dealer at The Florist in Globe Road stood at one end of the bar and his trade was tolerated by the staff. Apparently he used to work out of The Approach but was moved on. The Ten Bells in Commercial Street looked like the current residents were squatting in it - they may well have been. Almost nowhere did food.

Sandra Esquilant, the formidable landlady at The Golden Heart.

Then there was The Birdcage² (another omission) in Columbia Road for whom the word eclectic may have been invented. A normal weekend night would usually feature a gang of rough looking estate kids in one corner clearly on something a lot stronger than lager while a portly man in a dress and a feather boa banged out ‘I am what I am’ on the karaoke. The beer was basic, no cask ale and definitely no craft beer. This was 2007. But the nights were unforgettable. Pubs used to keep their own hours. Sandra Esquilant at The Golden Heart in Commercial Street had lock-ins until the early hours. Occasionally she would entertain the punters with her hula hoop at which she was incredibly good at for a woman in her 60s. Her surname is an Huguenot name, but she always celebrated Jewish new year in honour of Lawrence, the old man who collected the glasses. 

The author notes that the East End has “always been home to people born all over the world - from Huguenot weavers fleeing persecution in France to Irish, Ashkenazi Jewish and Bangladeshi communities…” Which is true up to a point. My own family was part of that story. My grandmother’s family came over from Poland and Ukraine in the 1890s to escape the anti-Semitic pogroms, something that seems particularly vivid now. They lived in the East End and worked in the rag trade before making good and moving out to Ealing and later Hertfordshire. In fact my Uncle Louis was appalled when I told him I lived in Bethnal Green, “Your great grandfather had a tailor’s shop in Whitechapel. Why do you want to live there? It’s a shithole!”

The extraordinary tilework at The Ten Bells in Commercial Street

The Jews largely moved out after the war. I remember a tragic old Jewish lady who lived in that council block in Aldgate. She’d seen her whole community move on or die out and there she was surrounded by Bangladeshi immigrants. One of the things that the book doesn’t mention is that this last large wave of immigration presents special problems for those trying to run a pub, something like 40% of the borough of Tower Hamlets is Muslim. Whitechapel and Brick Lane in particular are peppered with ghost pubs like The Grave Maurice in Whitechapel Road which the Kray Twins used to haunt in the 1960s. 

It’s been downhill since then for the traditional East End life. The docks closed from 1969 to 1981 and London which had been a major port since Roman times was one no longer. All the old breweries have gone too, the original owners of the pubs. The last of them, Truman, Hanbury & Buxton closed its Black Eagle brewery in Brick Lane in 1989. It is somewhat inevitably now an arts space. So many East Londoners moved out to Essex and Kent that a proper Cockney accent is an increasingly rare occurrence while there’s a lot of West Ham supporters where I live in Faversham. Combine this exodus with what Von Lion describes as “pestilence, the Luftwaffe, beer tax, supermarket price wars, the smoking ban, the cost of living crisis and changing drinking habits” and who would want to run a pub in the East End?

Despite all this, East End Pubs remains an optimistic book. It contains profiles of 65 pubs sometimes with photos of the current landlords or landladies. There’s some great characters in there. Another pleasure is lingering over the beautiful tilework that was put in by the original owners, breweries like Trumans or Manns. It was also good to see that there are still some proper old boozers around like The Carpenters Arms on Cambridge Heath Road which I never dared to go into despite living next door for two years. But most have had to adapt to survive. Sandra at the Golden Heart welcomed artists like Tracey Emin who moved into the area in the ‘90s. While Julian Apperley, the landlord at the Hare, manages to keep a nice balance of old locals and incomers. It helps that he serves some of the best cask beer in London and keeps a very right ship. There’s no funny business allowed at The Hare. At one point he closed for a refurbishment and posted a sign saying ‘don’t worry, we haven’t gone bistro.’

Julian Apperley, he’s not having any funny business.

Others, however, have gone upmarket. Just round the corner, The Dundee Arms, where I had a memorable reconciliation drink with my wife, is now a craft beer place. Though some of these revamped pubs look spectacular with all the period fittings lovingly restored, the wealthier incomers sit in an uneasy relationship with the old Cockneys. Von Lion notes “an increasing number of local establishments out of the financial reach for many East Enders.” The new crowd is more transitory, its people like me who live somewhere for five or ten years and then move out to Stoke Newington or further afield to have children. The revamped pubs are less eclectic, you’re certainly not going to get your old council estate regulars in. In fact, some of the few places that do still attract everyone are Wetherspoons, who can resist a £2 pint of Ruddles?

I left the East End in 2013 first to Lewisham (there are some brilliant pubs in South East London which would make a good follow-up book) and have only been back to The Hare once since then. Maceili was there behind the bar and, without asking, poured me a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. 

'East End Pubs: A Celebration of East London's Most Iconic Boozers' by Tim George & the 'London Pub Explorer' Alistair Von Lion is published by Hoxton Mini Press

1. Now Coupette, a noted cocktail bar.

2. It’s now a Brewdog pub.