Narrow brick pub on a corner with a dark green front, a mass of pink flowers and a blue plaque

The Grapes

76 Narrow Street, Limehouse, London E14 8BP

Grade C · TraditionTrading · checked Sept 2026

The Grapes claims 1583. The records say 1805.

Claimed: 1583
First record: 1805
Building: no single date

The building. A nineteenth-century facade in the national register's reading — stock brick, four storeys, two windows wide, sashes with vertical glazing bars under segmental arches, a fascia board over the ground floor and a small centre bay between two doors; the 1720s often quoted for the house is not the register's date.

Pub website Directions

Riverside
Real ale
Food
Dog friendly

How old is it, really?

How to read this ribbon

Hatched: 222 years the pub claims but no document confirms. Solid: 221 years on record.

The claim

A slim Georgian pub on Narrow Street with its back to the Thames, the Grapes claims an ancestry going back to 1583. Dickens knew it and is thought to have drawn on it for the riverside tavern in Our Mutual Friend. Co-owned by Sir Ian McKellen, it keeps a Gandalf staff behind the bar and a tiny river terrace.

What the records show

The claim is the pub's own: its website calls it a traditional London pub since 1583. No record is cited for that date, and the surviving narrow riverside building is 18th-century. The 1805 belongs to the blog A London Inheritance, which worked through the newspapers for Narrow Street and found the house there in the early 1800s as Mrs Horsley's Bunch of Grapes, including an advertisement of 1805 in which Mrs Horseley sought staff for the pub. It names no newspaper, so the advertisement has not been seen here. CAMRA's entry dates the building between 1787 and 1797, when it was the Bunch of Grapes, which fits a house trading by 1805.

Dated evidence for The Grapes, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1583	Claimed founding	The pub
1805	First record of a drinking house here	A London Inheritance, on an 1805 advert for staff

What to look for inside

Thought to inspire the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Our Mutual Friend
Co-owned by Sir Ian McKellen since 2012
Gandalf's staff displayed behind the bar
Riverside veranda survived wartime bombing

Visiting

The Grapes is in London, England, at 76 Narrow Street, Limehouse, London E14 8BP. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

thegrapes.co.uk Directions in your maps app

Sources

Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026

Run this pub? There is a badge for it

Free to put on your own site, no permission needed. It shows what the pub claims and what the records support, and it changes when the data does.

How to use it, and how to change what it says — if you have a document we have not seen, we would like to read it.

Above: the record · Below: what readers rememberThe record ends here

Raise a glass

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The snug

What people remember about the Grapes

Nobody has written about this pub yet. These are readers’ own recollections, not our records — we check documents, not memories, and a memory never moves a date or a grade.

Were you a regular here?

We are after the things a record cannot hold: the landlord’s name, what was behind the bar, the room that is not there any more, the year the fire was moved. One paragraph is plenty.

The snug opens shortly. Until it does, send it to hello@oldpubs.com and we will put it on this page with your name on it.

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