The Best Pubs in Hampstead: A Local's Guide

Hampstead takes its pubs seriously. This is a neighbourhood with a 300-year tradition of literary and intellectual drinking, and the pubs have absorbed something of that heritage — not as museum pieces, but as genuinely living institutions that happen to have extraordinary histories.

The Spaniards Inn

The Spaniards Inn on Spaniards Road dates from 1585 and occupies a peculiar strip of heath-side land that has been a licensed premises for over four centuries. Dick Turpin stabled his horse here; Keats, Byron, and Shelley all drank in the same low rooms. The beer garden is enormous and reliably full on summer afternoons. The Sunday roast is exceptional.

The Holly Bush

The Holly Bush requires navigational effort — up the steep steps of Holly Mount, off Heath Street — and rewards it accordingly. A 17th-century pub divided into small interconnecting rooms, it is the kind of place where conversations happen because the architecture demands it. Harvey's Sussex Best is the reliable order.

The Flask

Flask Walk's pub — simply called The Flask — is a Young's house with a long history and an excellent terrace for summer drinking. It was here, according to tradition, that the famous Hampstead spa water was once bottled for sale in the city. The interior retains its Victorian partitions and the atmosphere of a genuinely local pub.

The Wells Tavern

Not a traditional boozer but a gastropub of considerable quality, the Wells on Well Walk does serious modern British cooking alongside a thoughtful drinks list. For a long Friday evening that begins with oysters and ends somewhere around the third glass of something excellent, it is hard to beat.