The Grapes, LondonThe Grapes
- Best time
- Early evening at high tide, for the veranda
- Getting there
- Narrow Street in Limehouse; Limehouse DLR or Westferry
Why it’s in the log
The Grapes is a single room wide and sits directly on the north bank, with a small veranda out over the water at the back. Its origins are usually given as around 1583 and its structure as the 1720s — the familiar split between the licence and the walls. It is Grade II listed.
The Dickens link is the strongest literary claim in this collection and still not settled. The pub is generally taken as the model for the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Our Mutual Friend, which Dickens published in 1865 and described as having "not a straight floor and hardly a straight line." That description has held up — the floor still is not straight. Some Dickens readers argue for the Prospect of Whitby instead, a mile upriver, and no document settles it either way.
It is owned in partnership by the actor Ian McKellen, the director Sean Mathias and the publisher Evgeny Lebedev, an arrangement that has kept it small and unmodernised rather than the opposite. Space is genuinely tight: a dozen people fill the downstairs bar.
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