The Prospect of Whitby, LondonThe Prospect of Whitby
- Best time
- Whenever the tide is up — the terrace is the whole point
- Getting there
- Wapping Wall; Wapping on the Overground
Why it’s in the log
Here as the cautionary one. The Prospect advertises 1520 and "London's oldest riverside tavern," and that 1520 date does not appear in print until the 1950s — a long silence for a fact supposedly four centuries old. It is also absent from CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, the list that records interiors which genuinely survive. The pubs with real fabric are on it. This one is not.
What is documented turns out to be better than the slogan. There was a tavern here called the Devil's Tavern, with a reputation to match. It burned, was rebuilt in 1777, and took a new name from a collier moored alongside: the Prospect of Whitby, built at Whitby in Yorkshire that same year, 373 tons register, square-rigged on three masts, owned by James Watty and John Lacy. Sailors used "the Prospect's moorings" as shorthand for this stretch of river, and the pub eventually registered itself under the name it had already been given.
Of the pre-1777 building, what survives is the floor — worn flagstones, and not much else. Come for the terrace and the river, which are genuinely among the best in London, and read the date on the sign as advertising.
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