Older Than America: Seven Hammersmith Pubs on the Thames
We had three days in London over the August bank holiday and no agenda beyond walking a lot and drinking carefully. We stayed in Hammersmith, which turns out to have a stretch of riverside with more history per hundred metres than most cities manage in total.
This is the Saturday. Camden is the next one. Olesia’s account of the same weekend — the walking, the river and the photographs — is in Walking London, Part One.
The Craft Beer Co., Hammersmith
17–18 The Broadway, W6 9YD
We came off the tube with the luggage still on our backs and I went straight in, because I had been on a train for three hours, plus the Tube, and had reached the end of my patience. Olesia has been very patient about this over the years.
It’s part of the Craft Beer Co. chain — Covent Garden, Brixton, Clerkenwell, St Mary Axe, plus The Bear in Paddington and The Clement Attlee trading under their own names. This one sits inside the station foyer with a second door onto a patio garden, which means you can drink outdoors while watching people miss their trains.
Around twenty taps, art deco inside, maybe ten four-seat tables and a lot more seating out front. Quiet at two on a Saturday afternoon, which is not peak time for anyone. We passed it again on the Monday on our way home, at about five, and it was absolutely packed.
I had Field Trip, a New Zealand pale at 5% brewed by Burning Sky with the Craft Beer Co.’s own brewery — £6.90 a pint, which in central London is close to a bargain. Then a West Coast IPA from Orbit at 5.5%, good but harsher. That pattern repeated all weekend, and by Monday I’d admitted something to myself: I’m a pale ale man now. The IPAs I keep reaching for are the smooth ones. Somewhere in the last few years the arms race stopped being fun.
Across those taps the range covers sours (raspberry and lime, grapefruit rattlers), lagers including a dark one around 5%, IPAs and pales from 4 to 8%, four-plus beer-can sliders and an alcohol-free option. House drafts run £7–£9 a pint; guest beers often come in two-thirds, which works out around £11.60 pint-equivalent.
Food is pork pies in several styles, scotch eggs, and a tie-up with the pizza place next door via QR code. There’s a proper cocktail and wine list and a bottle fridge, so nobody in your party has to suffer.
I’ve been to the Covent Garden branch plenty of times and it’s always been good, so I’d assumed the standard held across the chain. It does.
The Hop Poles
17–19 King Street, W6 9HR — about a hundred metres on, unplanned
We came out of the station and started the hundred metres to the hotel, suitcases and all, with one good pint already behind me. Then we passed a sign reading CRAFT BEER. That settled the next stop.
The Hop Poles is an old building that has been talked into being a sports bar. The original ceiling detail and the cast-iron columns with their ornate tops and bottoms are all still there, alongside televisions, fruit machines, gaming slots and a roof terrace that would be excellent in the right weather.
Six to eight craft options sitting on top of a large mainstream range: London Pride, Hancock’s, a couple of Jubel taps, Tiny Rebel IPA, Neck Oil, Camden, Brixton. I tried a Gypsy Hill first and found it too harsh.
Then the day’s surprise: Juicy Chunk, a hazy from Jiddler’s Tipple. Smooth, fruity, no edges — my favourite thing I drank all Saturday. If you know Jubel, it’s that juicy character with the sweetness taken out and the texture improved considerably. I’d have it again tomorrow.
The barrel change went wrong while we were there and produced mostly foam, so the barman pulled several pints of it into the drip tray to let things settle, which I respected. Worth going back for one poured properly.
Their Craft & Cocktail Thursday puts all craft beers at £5.75, and there’s live music on Thursday and Friday. We were there on the Saturday, so I can’t report on either.
The riverside row
Four pubs in about 250 metres, along the Thames footpath
The Black Lion
Off the A4 and down through the residential side streets toward the footpath. The Black Lion is a traditional pub — wood panelling, leather chairs round a fireplace, a proper bar. Outside there’s a garden with a children’s play area and a television for the sport, and another television inside.
Around ten beers on, mostly commercial, about three craft. I had a half of an IPA that tasted vinegary and I wouldn’t recommend it. But it was busy on a Saturday night, full of families and locals, and it isn’t trying to be a craft beer destination. Go for the atmosphere. Order something you can’t get wrong.
The Dove
The Dove is reputedly the smallest bar room in the country, possibly the world, which is a bit of a gimmick given the rest of the pub is a normal size. The layout runs: tiny front bar with four or five seats, main bar with four or five tables, up some steps to a food-focused dining area of ten to fifteen tables, out to Thames-side seating for about ten more, and a small mezzanine above part of it.
Almost entirely locals, chatty and genuine, maybe one or two other visitors. Small craft selection — the one I had was good quality and fairly priced, and I entirely failed to write down what it was. Thanks to Olesia’s photograph I can now say with confidence that it was Budding, an organic pale ale from Stroud Brewery at 4.5%: complex, citrus notes, a sweet malt afternote.
There is a red plaque by the door claiming this is the best place on the Thames to watch the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, and that an eighteenth-century regular wrote ‘Rule Britannia’ here. Hemingway and Dylan Thomas drank here too, and William Morris lived next door. I mention all this because the pub itself does not.
This pub is not the place for range. Very much the place for a traditional Thames-side pub with people actually talking in it.
The Rutland Arms
The Rutland Arms is Greene King, and normally that’s where I stop reading. Here it was well kept. I had Tiny Rebel’s Club Tropicana, which is commercially brewed craft and one of my favourite beers full stop — my pick of the day. Olesia had a Jubel. About four craft or own-brand options alongside a large commercial range.
The pub dates from 1849: traditional brickwork, arched windows, metal railings outside, and inside, high ceilings with cornicing, all of it very well maintained. Packed on a Saturday night, inside and out along the riverbank, a good mix of twenties to forties plus locals. Live music and events most weekends. Brilliant place.
Food is standard Greene King, which we didn’t try. For the record, Fuller’s is London’s pie benchmark, and this isn’t that.
The Blue Anchor
The Blue Anchor has been licensed since 9 June 1722. Old building, renovated nicely with the original features kept. The fourth pub in about two hundred and fifty metres along this pedestrian strip, and busy with a younger crowd — eighteen to forties — spread across the benches by the water.
Not normally a craft venue at all, but the bank holiday had brought out an outdoor bar with a guest beer: Hepcat, from Gypsy Hill, the London microbrewery. Fresh and good, and notably better than the Gypsy Hill I’d had earlier the same day, which is a useful reminder about how much of this is condition rather than recipe.
Riverside Studios
101 Queen Caroline Street, W6 9BN — not a pub, and better for it
After a long walk along the riverbank, and several dozen photographs of the iron bridge, we stopped at Riverside Studios, which to our surprise was still open at half past ten.
This is where they filmed TFI Friday in the late nineties and early two-thousands, with Chris Evans. You can work out what TFI stands for. It’s been revamped since and still functions as a film studio, but there’s a bar on a Saturday evening and it is a genuinely interesting place to be if you’re a Brit of a certain age.
Five to ten tables of people drinking and talking, ages running from about eighteen to eighty. I was somewhere agreeably in the middle.
The beer is from Lost and Grounded, the Bristol brewery. I had the pale and preferred it to the IPA, which was a touch harsh — you’ll notice the theme by now. What makes it different from everywhere else in Hammersmith is the structure of the offer: every other place here is a historic pub with a wall of commercial taps and a craft option bolted on. Here the craft is the default and there are a couple of commercial taps to look after everyone else. It isn’t a craft beer venue as such. It’s a venue that picked one brewery and picked well.
Would I come all the way to Hammersmith for it? No. If you’re in Hammersmith, yes.
The Distillers
64 Fulham Palace Road, W6 9PH — walked past, noted for next time
On the way back to the hotel we passed The Distillers, a Fuller’s pub the press keeps calling the best in Hammersmith for craft beer. On the evidence of this weekend I would give that to the Craft Beer Co. — but we did not go into The Distillers, so it is not a fair fight. Nicely done inside — stylish mid-century décor against an industrial bar. There was live acoustic music on when we went by, and they advertise comedy nights, karaoke and more music on Thursdays.
It was late and we didn’t stop for a drink, so I can’t tell you whether the claim holds — only that they have about twenty beers on draught, including Fuller’s ales, and a big choice in cans. Next time.
The verdict
Here is the honest summary, and it isn’t the one I expected to write.
The Hammersmith riverside row — Blue Anchor, Rutland Arms, The Dove, Black Lion, four pubs inside 250 metres — is not about craft beer. Decent options exist and the quality is inconsistent. If you come here hunting taps you will spend the evening mildly disappointed while standing somewhere lovely.
The exception is the Craft Beer Co. at the station: a real craft destination, twenty-plus taps, high quality, worth the detour if you’re nearby. Though I have to be straight with you — I wouldn’t travel to Hammersmith for it, because Covent Garden is just as good and considerably more central. The second might be The Distillers, but we walked past it at eleven at night, so that is a recommendation I have not earned.
What I would travel for is the row itself. And once a year this stretch of riverbank is one of the best places in London to watch the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race — The Dove has a plaque up claiming it is the best, which is the sort of thing a pub says about itself, but it isn’t far wrong.
Two of the pubs we drank in that night were already open for business before the American Declaration of Independence was signed. The Blue Anchor has been licensed since June 1722; its own plaque points out that by the time it celebrated fifty years, the Declaration had still not been written, Captain Cook had only just found his way to Australia, and the French Revolution was twenty years off. The Dove dates from the early eighteenth century. The Black Lion is late-eighteenth-century, so it may or may not have made the cut, and the Rutland Arms did not open until 1849, which in this company makes it a recent development.
It’s the licence that is old, not just the brickwork. The trade. People standing in that spot buying a drink, before 1776. And what’s in them now isn’t heritage tourism — it’s locals, on a Saturday, doing the thing they were always doing.
You find the same in Soho, in Covent Garden, in any London neighbourhood with a settled working population. It is not a Hammersmith speciality. It’s just that Hammersmith has four of them in a row with the Thames in front.
Pub culture has shaped British social life for the better part of three hundred years, and it’s thinning out — a younger generation staying in with phones and games, and a cost structure that makes staying in the rational choice. I’ve written about that separately and at length, because it deserves more than a paragraph at the end of a pub crawl.
For now: go to Hammersmith, walk the row, drink whatever is in good condition, and stand outside the Blue Anchor working out what else was happening in 1722.
Addresses
- The Craft Beer Co., Hammersmith
17–18 The Broadway, London W6 9YD
thecraftbeerco.com - The Hop Poles
17–19 King Street, London W6 9HR
socialpubandkitchen.co.uk - The Black Lion
2 South Black Lion Lane, London W6 9TJ
blacklion.london - The Dove
19 Upper Mall, London W6 9TA
dovehammersmith.co.uk - The Rutland Arms
15 Lower Mall, London W6 9DJ
greeneking.co.uk - The Blue Anchor
13 Lower Mall, London W6 9DJ
blueanchorlondon.com - Riverside Studios
101 Queen Caroline Street, London W6 9BN
riversidestudios.co.uk - The Distillers
64 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 9PH
distillershammersmith.co.uk
All eight are within a twenty-minute walk of Hammersmith station. The four riverside pubs are within 250 metres of each other on the Thames path.
Next: Camden. Two breweries under railway arches and the actual Amy Winehouse pub.
