On EastEnders' 40th birthday, let's go in search of the soap's iconic pub. London has only one remaining Queen Victoria pub, as far as I can tell, but remnants of several pubs of that name survive.
The Queen Victoria, 148 Southwark Park Road, Bermondsey SE16 3RP
London's last Queen Vic isn't in the East End, it's in Southwark. But it is in a properly working class part of Southwark amid the council estates of Bermondsey, quite near the shops on Southwark Park Road. Best of all it's a proper throwback from the reign of the monarch it's named after, a cornerpub from when this entire area was packed with Victorian terraces. You can still find a few of these if you walk down the right streets, then you turn a corner and it's all postwar flats and modern apartment blocks as is so often the case in inner London. Had the pub been one street corner to the east the Luftwaffe would have got it but instead it shines on with its yellow brick, sash windows and brown faience tiles. One less storey and it could almost pass for the actual fictional Queen Vic.
Indeed a bit of digging suggests the soap's producers visited when the show first went into production and used the bar "for a dummy run". So says Julie O'Sullivan, the pub's millennial landlady, although she also claims that "Barbara Windsor, Dot Cotton, Ross Kemp, Shane Richie" have drunk here which suggests she sometimes mixes the real and the fictional. Alas Julie had the lease taken away from her in 2019, such is the way of pubcos, and the latest owners haven'tquite retained the ambience. The central wooden bar is still there but now with downlit optics and the upper display shelf removed, plus Julie would never have allowed those chairs in here or illuminated a ring around the dartboard. But it still looks good because Craft Union like to put on a decent show, and it still has a bottle blonde behind the bar (called Carole) with a cheery voice well capable of passing an E20 audition.
The clientele however aren't the happy mixed crew seen on TV, they're Frank Butcher types sitting around in shirtsleeves with pints, or at least they were on my visit to the Queen Vic. We're in Millwall territory so the discussion often turns to football, and by the looks of it watching Sky Sports and collecting for the air ambulance. Dogs are welcome. Jenkins' Pale Ale and Chambers Best Bitter are not sold. They had a big Valentine's event on Saturday, which I could tell because the window was still emblazoned with lovehearts, so it's by no means a one-dimensional space. And yes it may lack the drama but it's a pub with cheery soul and I suspect you'd be pleased if London's last Queen Victoria was your local.
formerly The Queen Victoria, 118 Wellington Street, Woolwich SE18 6XY
This one still stands, still displays a Queen Victoria sign out front and you can still go inside. But it hasn't been a pub since July 2009, this despite the fact it's directly opposite Woolwich Barracks and you'd think there'd be a steady stream of punters. It then became a hostel, and still might be upstairs, but the former bar has since been taken over by a lowly convenience store called the Q. Victoria Supermarket. I'd have abbreviated it 'Queen Vic Supermarket' instead and taken down all the Oyster top-up signs, but I was not consulted.
It still looks striking from a distance, a three storey gabled building with two tall chimneys rising higher than seemingly necessary and a fading inn sign depicting a book-reading monarch above what used to be the door. These days you enter up the side, they hope enticed by a wall of generic grocery vinyls and adverts for Lyca mobile, and it's so out of date the alcohol options still include a bottle of Becks. But the interior is low-key, low-lit and low-appeal, and all I spotted was Robinson's fruit squash, so unless you live locally and have run out of something urgent I probably wouldn't.
formerly TheQueen Victoria, 1 Gillender Street E3 3JW
This one's well placed, within sight of the actual tube station which stands in for Walford East on the EastEnders tube map, which is Bromley-by-Bow. It's also properly Victorian (of 1860s vintage) and lingered as a proper Cockney knees-up pub until it found itself isolated on the wrong side of a seething dual carriageway. When I blogged about it for the 20th anniversary it still had a brightly painted frontage and chalkboard adverts for live music but it had already closed down, indeed it called last orders in 2003. The building subsequently got turned into flats and not in a good way, more subdivided into 11 rooms, and judging by the state of the letterboxes out front no landlord's ever shown it any love whatsoever. I grimace every time I walk by, thankful only that nobody's ever whitewashed over the old Charrington & Toby Ale tiles out front.
The ex-pub looks seriously out of place these days, sandwiched between a new secondary school and its rainbow-panelled theatre, indeed it's probably lucky it closed so early otherwise it'd be a chemistry lab or changing room by now. Given this is notionally where the soap is set it's just as well the BBC built a set at Elstree rather on waste ground beside the river Lea because this corner of E3 has evolved far faster than E20.
Still in the East End, not only does this look every inch a Victorian boozer but it's attached to a proper Victorian terrace, part of a patch of conservation area between Columbia Road Market and Roman Road. Just look at the gorgeous 'The Queen Victoria' moulding on the roof beneath a royal crest. In this case closure came in 1993 before this corner of Bethnal Green became the gentrification magnet it is today, and the odd grey doors at pavement level now lead to separate flats. The planters out front somehow haven't been removed by Tower Hamlets' car-friendly Mayor, not yet, and yes I did have to wait for marketgoers clutching wrapped flowers to get out of the way before I took that photo.
Now we're into the no-shows. This is the site of the Queen Victoria in Haggerston, about half a mile north of the last site, where the pub and all the houses it served have long been swept from the map. Instead the area's now solid former council housing, almost entirely flats, with the location of the Queen Vic now a row of parking spaces along the front of Fellows Court. Pubs are no longer a feature of the surrounding neighbourhood, the nearby shopping parade is as downbeat as it gets and the local primary school closed last year due to lack of pupils. If EastEnders were set here, sorry Haggerston, it'd be an utter gloomfest.
I got here too late because this Queen Victoria was demolished in March 2021. That said it was in a horrible-looking flat-roofed 60s building, locally known as Victoria House, and had been empty since 2006 so no great loss. Three quadrants round the big crossroads in North Cheam have a charming 30s suburban vibe but this corner looks a lot better as rubble behind blank hoardings. The current plan is to build a 7-storey block of flats as a 'gateway development', which anywhere in inner London might look quite normal but would be a jarring highrise imposition here. No replacement pub is planned but a Wetherspoons exists just round the corner on London Road and that's quite enough.
formerly TheQueen Victoria, 13 Tooting Grove, Tooting SW17 0RA
Art deco 1930s pub with copper roof, renamed 'The Little House' before it closed in 2010. An English Heritage spot-listing failed so now subdivided into five quite nice-looking flats.
formerly The Queen Victoria, 98 Mitcham Road, Croydon CRO 3RJ
A chalet-fronted boozer on the road out of West Croydon, closed in 2004, demolished in 2012 and now serving the community as a car park. Nothing to see here.
formerly The Queen Victoria, 136 Falcon Road, Battersea SW11 2LP
Renamed 'The Spikey Hedgehog' before it closed in 1999, then demolished, now a block of flats called St Luke's Court. No point visiting specially.
formerly The Queen Victoria, 121 Bath Road, Hounslow TW3 3BT
Closed 1996, also demolished for flats, and I think we've gone far enough back now.
And finally a classic postwar pub that's now lumpen flats. It was situated at the end of an L-shaped street called Albert Square, a real one in Maryland, even though its original square-ish attributes are hard to distinguish today. The pub was known as The Albert House for most of its existence, due to its location, but the final owners decided to capitalise on soap notoriety and renamed it The Queen Vic. This didn't ultimately help to bring a rush of punters, even with a flapping inn sign out front, and when I turned up for the 20th anniversary it was already being redeveloped. The resulting block is called Basle House and the bit that used to be the pub has hardly any windows and looks terribly bland. Judging by the outbreak of angry posters all over the bin store an angry row appears to have broken out regarding the improper dumping of black bags, but as storylines go that's pretty poor so I'd stick with the real Queen Vic on the actual Albert Square tonight instead.
