Welcome back to Vittles Pub Guide week! Earlier this week, we published the first instalment: Jimmy McIntosh’s fully updated guide to central London’s best pubs. Since then, we’ve had guides to West London and South London. Today, we travel east. Tomorrow, we’ll publish the last of the area guides, when we announce the best pubs in North London. And finally, on Saturday, we’ll share the top 10 best pubs in London. Cheers to Jimmy and to you all for reading.
All entries by Jimmy McIntosh, unless otherwise stated. Artwork by Dan Biddulph. Click here for a reminder of ‘the rules’.
The backstreet community Cockney boozers of yore have, it must be said, largely disappeared; with gastropubs or hip craft establishments taking their place. But there’s still a lot to be said for a traditional East London pub. Here’s the best of the best.
The Wheatsheaf45 Wheatsheaf Rd, RM1 2HD
If you want an accurate depiction of cockney drinking in 2026, then your best bet is to get the Elizabeth line out to Romford, where many of them flocked to after the Second World War. The Wheatsheaf has been run by the Smith family since 1969 (bar eight years in the Nineties), and that familiar, old-fashioned hospitality acts as a kind of homing beacon, drawing me in whenever I happen to be in the area for a pint or four. It is, it goes without saying, a gorgeous-looking place, the sort you wish they all could be: perfectly lit and maintained, especially in the back bar, which really does have to be seen to be believed. But it’s the warm reception you get when you nip in for a swift one that’s the standout feature, and what keeps me coming back again and again.
Admiral Vernon141 Broad St, RM10 9HP
Another entry, another Brewer’s Tudor pub: this time a Grade II-listed 1930s number out in the sprawling suburbia of Dagenham. Although it’s typical of the pubs that were built in these ‘new East End’ towns – giant corner palaces like The Drill, The Eastbrook or The Ardleigh – the Admiral Vernon is the best preserved, with all three rooms (Saloon, Bar, Games Room) still largely the same as it would have been in the interwar period. In classic Essex borderlands tradition, live music is the Vernon’s raison d’être, taking place twice a week. But it’s the potent combination of the golden wood and deep blue carpet that keeps me coming back to RM10.
The Alderman52 Chippenham Rd, RM3 8HX
By the time you’re reading this, The Alderman might be nothing more than a pile of rubble in the rolling tarmac of Harold Hill, another victim of Big Developer, who I suspect would very much like to turn the entirety of London into an even more dull and beige version of Barking Riverside. But what was it like? Well, it was a little bit Sixties kitsch, a little bit Swiss chalet; a two-roomed, wood-panelled paradise used almost solely by a tight-knit local community. The loss of The Alderman means that they’ll have to hotstep it almost a mile to the nearest pub, The Saxon King, if they want to get blotto. But places like The Alderman are important lifelines for the elderly, the lonely or the isolated. Where do they go when these pubs close? For now, at the time of writing, The Alderman clings on. Get down there while you still can.
