London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars updates
Central London: Soho and Leicester Square
Coach and Horses, London W1
Traditional pub (Fuller’s lease)
29 Greek Street W1F 7HG
T (020) 7437 5920 W www.coachandhorsessoho.co.uk
Open 1100 (1200 Sun) – 2300 (2230 Sun).
Cask beers 4 (3 Fuller’s, 1 guest) Cask Marque, Other beers 2 keg, 2 bottles, Also A few wines
Food Enhanced pub grub. Wifi.
Wed/Sat piano singalongs
The Coach and Horses’ claim to be the West End’s most famous pub may be contestable, but it’s certainly one of London’s most legendary boozers, deeply embedded in Soho’s literary and disreputable heritage. It’s celebrated for its associations with satirical magazine Private Eye and for attracting the arty and painterly crowd that migrated south from Fitzrovia in the 1950s. For 62 years until 2006 it was run by Norman Balon, who revelled in the title of ‘London’s rudest landlord’, a skill deployed in wrangling a customer base of hard drinking characters including Francis Bacon, Peter O’Toole, Tom Baker, George Melly and Lucien Freud. Their patron saint was the self-destructive Spectator columnist and veteran regular Jeffrey Bernard (1932-97), famously portrayed by O’Toole in the late 1980s in Keith Waterhouse’s play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, after the euphemism the magazine used when the old soak was too drunk or hung over to file his copy. Memorabilia of the play, of Bernard himself and of many more aspects of the pub’s past are displayed on the walls, including clippings of Private Eye strip ‘The Regulars’ which was inspired by the pub, its landlord and customers.
Since Norman’s departure thankfully no-one has sought to shoulder his reputation and the Coach has become a less intimidating place: there are now piano singalongs and decent food from a short menu that includes some interesting veggie options, the sort of frippery that might once have provoked the landlord’s ire. But little has changed in appearance: the well-worn floor, dark red walls and wood panelling, still seemingly coated in tar all these years after the smoking ban, don’t appear to have been refitted since the early 1960s. Vestiges of branding from its days as an Ind Coope pub remain, like a lightbox above the bar advertising Double Diamond and the Taylor Walker lantern outside, dating from the first revival of the name of the long defunct East End brewery in the 1980s (it’s recently been revived again as one of pubco Spirit’s pub brands). The main drinking area is a medium sized single bar retaining elements of its old partitioning. There’s an upstairs room, too, where Eye fortnightly editorial meetings are still held, accessible only from behind the bar and now marketed during the day as ‘Soho’s Secret Tea Room’.
Fuller’s bought the pub in 2011 but the leaseholders who took over from Norman are still in place and are certainly not running it as a branded Fuller’s house. Three of the brewery’s beers are now on sale, though, including Chiswick Bitter, rare in the West End, alongside Gale’s Seafarer’s and London Pride. The fourth guest pump can get quite exotic — a St Peter’s green hop beer when I called. Bottled Pride and bargain priced Vintage Ale are in the fridge and Leffe and Staropramen widen the keg choices.
National Rail Charing Cross Underground Leicester Square, Tottenham Court Road, Covent Garden Cycling LCN+ 39 6 6A Walking Jubilee Walkway
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