Welcome back to Vittles Pub Guide week! Yesterday, we published the first instalment: Jimmy McIntosh’s fully updated guide to central London’s best pubs. Today, we travel to West London. We will be publishing every day between now and Saturday, when we’ll share the top 10 best pubs in London.
All entries by Jimmy McIntosh, unless otherwise stated. Artwork by Dan Biddulph. Click here for a reminder of ‘the rules’.
Pubs on this side of the capital are often misunderstood; the punchline to a joke: too samey, too posh, too boring. But it couldn’t be further from the truth – look west and there’s real magic. Here are the best of the W postcodes and beyond: 18 great places to drink in Paddington, Notting Hill, Chelsea, Fulham, Shepherds Bush, Ealing, Teddington, Harrow and Southall.
St Gabriels Social Club388 Northolt Rd, HA2 8EX
I stumbled across this place by complete chance on St Patrick’s Day this year, the last stop on an odyssey across the undulating topography of South Harrow and Sudbury Hill. It’s not listed on Google Maps as a pub, but it very much is one, in the classic Irish Metro-land shop conversion style: long, narrow, cheap, boisterous. St Gabriels Social Club operates nominally as the community events space for the Catholic church next door, but in practice anyone can go in – and anyone should, being as it is one of the most welcoming and wild boozers in all of north west London. It also serves an exceptional pint of plain, if that’s the sort of thing that gets you going.
Nineteen Club19 North Parade, Mollison Way, HA8 5QH
There are a number of excellent South Asian establishments in the north west of London that blur the lines between pub, restaurant, sports bar and members’ club, like The Regency, Deja Vu and The Cardamom Club. But there’s nowhere that possesses the pomp and pub glamour quite like Nineteen Club, located in the hinterland between Queensbury and Burnt Oak. It definitely errs more towards a Proper Boozer, with a rich cerulean carpet and ornate gold flourishes catching the eye, and a number of plush booths and bar seats almost always occupied by pint-hardened curry fanatics. The drinks are affordable, the food is on point – a lamb karahi is a real winner with a few beers – and the atmosphere is one of the most social of any tavern in town.
The Swan25 Park Rd, WD23 3EE
It was a balmy, late summer’s Friday evening when I first visited The Swan. You hear it before you see it: the unmistakable wash of people nattering away over pints, meandering through the chocolate-box backstreets of Bushey. Head down an unassuming side road and the source of the noise is suddenly there – a gaggle of locals drinking at the front of possibly the most picturesque public house in all of London, the kind that, by and large, just doesn’t exist anymore. To get inside you clamber around the friendly, seated crowd, and there you’re greeted by an affable landlord, Gavin White, an unspoiled Victorian interior and a myriad of rare and unusual bar snacks. The garden out back is equally brimming. This is truly suburban boozing at its finest.
The Estcourt Arms2 St Johns Rd, WD17 1PT
The London pub scene is ephemeral. New places are always popping up, old favourites are constantly closing. The Estcourt Arms is, according to operators Star Pubs, due for a refurbishment. The artist’s impression of it paints the pub’s exterior a bland green-grey. The rich, weathered myrtle carpet is being stripped out, with a grey fern patterned number being put in. And the less said about the proposed wallpaper, the better. But it remains on my list for now, partly because the changes have yet to be made, and partly because, deep down, a pub’s value isn’t wholly in the strength of its interiors. The people make the pub, and the ones in The Estcourt have never been anything but convivial, charming and a load of good fun.
