The Spaniards Inn, LondonThe Spaniards Inn
- Best time
- After a Heath walk, before the light goes
- Getting there
- On Spaniards Road between Hampstead and Highgate, by Kenwood — best reached on foot across the Heath
Why it’s in the log
One of the few here where the claimed date and the building do not visibly disagree: sixteenth century, Grade II listed, standing where the road from Hampstead to Highgate runs along the top of the Heath.
Its best feature is not the pub but the toll house directly opposite, which survives and still narrows Spaniards Road to one lane. Traffic has to take turns around a building that stopped collecting tolls generations ago — the most tangible piece of old road architecture left anywhere near inner London.
It attracts legends the way every old roadside inn does, Dick Turpin above all, and those are stories rather than records. What is actually useful about the Spaniards is where it is: on the Heath's edge beside Kenwood, with a large garden, which makes it the natural end of a walk rather than somewhere you set out for on its own.
Also logged in London
All of London →
Cittie of Yorke
London, United KingdomA drinking house on this spot since about 1430, in a building from the 1920s — plus a Dylan Thomas poem that stayed lost for sixty years.
Gordon's Wine Bar
London, United KingdomLondon's oldest wine bar, poured from a candlelit cellar under Villiers Street since 1890.
Hoop and Grapes
London, United KingdomA leaning late-seventeenth-century timber house that Historic England calls a type once common in London and now very rare.
