The Grapes

Now owned by Sir Ian McKellen, this tavern (formerly the Bunch of Grapes) has stood on the same ground for half a millennia. It was known by Samuel Pepys, and by Dickens (again). In fact, the opening of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is supposedly based on it: “A tavern of dropsical appearance… long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. It had outlasted many a sprucer public house, indeed the whole house impended over the water but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver, who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.”