On 22 August last, some forty members and supporters of CAMRA’s London Pubs Group undertook an evening crawl of the E3 area. The participants met in the Little Driver at 125 Bow Road and although this pub is not a listed building, it is recognised by CAMRA as being of some regional importance. Built in 1851 of brick with a polished stone dado, it was refitted c.1900 and is now a single space around an almost island bar servery. Four sets of entrance doors indicate it was originally a series of rooms with possibly an off-sales. Some of the partitions survived up to about 1990 but now there are only short screens either side of the right-hand door. The Victorian bar counter survives but has been painted a mushroom colour. There is an island bar-back where the lower shelves look old and an ornate bar-back to the rear with mirrored sections including some decorated with roses. At the rear-left is a decorative Victorian mahogany fireplace with a carved hood and in the mantelpiece a lozenge-shaped mirror with (back-painted) flowers and leaves. Until around 2000, there was a grand wooden canopy and glass-gantry roof over the serving area supported by carved columns that bore painted and mirrored glass inserts. Whilst no doubt not of the 1850s, its removal completely changed the interior feel of the pub. The star attraction is now the massive Hoare & Co’s Celebrated Stout gilded mirror on the right-hand wall. Hoare & Co brewed at Smithfield and were taken over by Charrington in 1933, who then adopted their Toby Jug symbol. For many years the pub was run as part of the Finch’s chain.
There is a secluded beer garden to the rear and it was here that some participants met Bruce, the friendly and vocal tabby cat that visits daily. Fuller’s London Pride is the only real ale sold here but always in excellent condition and only £3.20 a pint. The bookmakers next door is the former Bow Road GER station of 1892 (closed 1949). Part of the station’s staircase can be seen from the garden. Despite being close to various railway lines, the pub’s name is believed to derive from the drivers (or drovers) that escorted cattle to Smithfield Market.
Next up was the Coborn (formerly Coborn Arms) situated in the road of the same name. This is a former Whitbread house acquired by Young’s in 1984, along with property next door. Whitbread themselves gained the pub upon their takeover of Lacon’s Brewery in 1965. In recent years Young’s have expanded the pub at the rear and side and redecorated in their own style as part of a refocusing on the food trade. The beers available are Young’s Bitter and Special plus one guest ale and Weston’s Old Rosie cider. The pub’s name is taken from Mrs Priscilla Coborn, the widow of a brewer who left funding in her will for the poor in Bow, although a recent sign depicted the music hall artist Charles Coborn who took his stage name from the area.
A short walk further down Coborn Road brought us to the Morgan Arms, a grand Victorian corner building dating from 1892 in red brick and terracotta. This was the first pub in the area to embrace the concept of the gastropub. In all honesty this saved what was a rundown keg-only former Watney backstreet boozer.
Reopened by Geronimo Inns and now part of Greene King’s Metropolitan Pub brand, the rebirth saw a new kitchen and dining room added to the rear. The impressive arched wooden bar counter gantry with stained glass remains, as does some decorative window glass at ceiling height. The mid-80s fad for giving pubs new names, invariably ending with a plural, saw it become ‘Playwrights’ for a time and a back-lit interior sign showed this until around five years ago. Five handpumps dispense real ales from national breweries and London microbreweries. The current, and original, pub name refers to landowner and politician Charles Morgan, who developed the area from the 1820s.
Around the corner in Lichfield Road we found the Lord Tredegar. This Grade II-listed building sits within a long terrace of Victorian houses backing on to the Great Eastern main line and is a focal point when looking along College Terrace from Tredegar Square. The pub is another which had declined to keg-only or with unreliable availability of real ale. Rescue in this case came from the Remarkable Restaurants chain (now Remarkable Pubs) who acquired and reopened the premises in 2012. The interior is in the company’s house-style with an ornate bar-back, good (original) bar counter and magnolia walls, plus the obligatory large world map. At the rear a dining area and open-plan kitchen have been added.
In the snug there hangs a miniature V1 rocket as a reminder that the first of these fell nearby. Although giving an impression of originality, all is not what it seems. Most of the décor is architectural salvage or recreation and even the exterior metal railings are new. A photo shows the previous incarnation with an interior of 1950s/60s Brewer’s Tudor; complete with fake beams, oil lamps, warming pans, rustic fireplace, a copious glass gantry above the bar and a low false ceiling. The pub was once owned by Allied Breweries and branded in their Taylor Walker livery. The pub’s name refers to the Barony of Tredegar which was granted to the Morgan family in 1859.
It was then via Lichfield Road, Grove Road and Haverfield Road to the Palm Tree. This is an ‘Improved’ public house c1935 by Eedle and Meyers, a notable architectural practice that specialised in pub design from the 1880s to 1946. Inter-war ‘improved’ or ‘reformed’ pubs aimed to avoid the amount of drunkenness associated with conventional Victorian and Edwardian public houses. Improved pubs were generally more spacious than their predecessors, often with restaurant facilities, function rooms and gardens, and consciously appealed to families and to a mix of incomes and classes. Central island serveries with counters opening onto several bars allowed the monitoring of customers and the efficient distribution of staff to whichever area needed service. The Palm Tree is not only grade II-listed but also on CAMRA’s London Regional Inventory of Pub Interiors of Special Historic Interest. The exterior has buff and mottled grey-blue ceramic work and displays Truman’s proud eagle. Inside are still two completely separate rooms. The corner one was once further subdivided into two smaller bars and an off-sales. It has a particularly attractive sweeping hemispherical end to the counter like a Scottish island bar, especially as there is a delicate ‘gantry’ in the centre, sadly shortened in 1977. The right-hand room was intended to be the smarter area as can be seen by the finer detailing of both the dado and the curved counter. Both counters have below them typical Truman’s tiled floor chequerwork, believed to have served as both ashtrays and spittoons. Until 1977 there was an office behind the bar where staff would take the customers’ money and receive change. The pub’s toilets on the right side are intact with dados of cream and some brown tiling, red-tiled floor and original fittings. The pub name is possibly derived from a ‘Palmer’s Wharf’ on the Regent’s Canal that imported palm timber.
To finish the crawl nearest the widest range of public transport options, a choice of buses or a brisk walk brought participants to Mile End station and the Wentworth Arms in Eric Street. A former Charrington pub, in 1991 it was acquired by Charles Wells as part of their expansion into the capital. Sadly, they later disposed of the business, and in a complete reversal of the trend seen elsewhere during the evening, real ale is no longer stocked. Ironically in 1976 it was the only one of the six pubs on the night’s itinerary that sold cask ale (and one of only six real ale pubs in the whole of E3). But overall the local pub scene is changing for the better, so there is hope for the Wentworth yet!
Jane Jephcote and Kim Rennie