Originally Posted by
Ash
There have been up to 39 pubs on the Old Kent Road, according to the dead pubs website (itself now converted into the pub history website) though possibly not all at once. I read a piece in a book last week about immigrant cleaner workers getting a 4am night bus on the Old Kent Road for cleaning jobs in the City. It claimed that there was only one pub left.
On Saturday I walked down the Old Kent Road to Kent, on the ancient Watling Street Roman road. These days Kent officially starts in Dartford so the journey went on through New Cross, Deptford, Blackheath, Shooter's Hill, Welling, Bexleyheath and Crayford - following the steps of Charles Dickens, Geoffrey 'The Jeff' Chaucer and his pilgrims (on their way to Canterbury), and a Roman soldier or two.
I counted three pubs currently alive as I walked down the Old Kent Road - Thomas Becket, Lord Nelson and finally The Windsor, which I noticed was at No 888. I gather the first two have been closed at some points in recent years, and the latter has has a rename (back to an older name, it looks). The Old Kent Road becomes New Cross Road at the border of Southwark and Lewisham boroughs, which was once the border of London and Kent (pre 1900), on the basis of a road being named after the place it goes to until it gets there.
The Windsor, with its three fat ladies address, was the last building on the south side of the road before the border, hence was the Last Pub in London*.
Between 1900 and 1965 the the expansion of London included the then Metropoliton Borough of Woolwich (making Arsenal a London club 65 years before Tottenham), pushing the border of London and Kent to the east of Shooter's Hill. An old boundary stone at the entrance to Oxley Wood marks this border. The last pub before here is The Bull on Shooter's Hill.
In 1965 the borders of London expanded to include the borough of Bexley, moving the border out to in and around the river Cray, between Crayford and Dartford. So the Bear and the Ragged Staff in Crayford is now The Last Pub in London.
And no, I didn't go in any of them. This was not a pub crawl.
*On that road, in case someone wants to quibble that there are lots of Last Pubs in London. Of course there are.