You order a pint at the bar. The bartender asks if you have tickets. You look up and notice a door at the back, a staircase leading somewhere else entirely. Welcome to one of London’s strangest and most beloved traditions: the pub theatre.
London has dozens of them. Some are tucked above corner pubs in Islington. Others hide behind velvet curtains in Camden. A few have been running for over fifty years. And at least one has had a pub on its site since the fifteenth century.
A Pub Has Stood on This Corner Since the 1400s
The Old Red Lion on St John Street in Islington doesn’t look like it’s hiding anything. The façade announces “1415 REBUILT 1899” in bold lettering above the door — a quiet boast that a pub has occupied this corner for over six hundred years.
It survived the Great Plague, the Great Fire, two world wars, and the arrival of craft beer. Through it all, the Old Red Lion kept pouring drinks.
The current Victorian building went up in 1899, but the site’s history as a tavern stretches back to the reign of Henry V. That’s before Shakespeare was born, before the printing press arrived in England, before almost anything we now associate with British culture had taken shape.
Somewhere along the way, the Old Red Lion added a theatre upstairs.
Why London Pubs and Theatre Have Always Gone Together
The connection between pubs and theatre is older than the West End itself.
In Elizabethan London, travelling troupes of actors performed in inn courtyards. Audience members would pack the galleries above, looking down at the cobbled yard where the players worked. The architecture of those inn-yards — galleries on three sides, a raised performance space, an audience looking in from above — directly inspired the design of the first permanent theatres, including The Globe.
The Tabard Inn in Southwark. The Bell in Gracechurch Street. All of them hosted performances before dedicated theatres existed. Theatre grew up inside pubs, not alongside them.
That relationship never entirely disappeared. But it faded for centuries, squeezed out by dedicated playhouses, music halls, and eventually cinemas. Then, in the 1970s, it came roaring back.
The Revival That Changed London Theatre
In 1970, a small theatre opened above a pub on Upper Street in Islington. The King’s Head Theatre charged its audience in pre-decimal currency — pounds, shillings and pence — as a deliberate act of theatrical protest. It became the first pub theatre of the modern era.
What followed was quiet and significant. Directors and writers who couldn’t afford West End rents found that a room above a pub was the perfect place to take risks. Intimate staging. No elaborate sets. An audience close enough to breathe the same air as the performers.
London’s pub theatres became laboratories. Productions that later transferred to the West End were often developed in these cramped upstairs rooms first. New writers found their audiences in Finsbury Park and Fulham before anyone further west noticed.
The tradition also changed what audiences expected of theatre. If you’ve ever seen a production where the cast is close enough to touch, where the fourth wall feels genuinely breakable, there’s a good chance it grew out of the pub theatre movement.
What It’s Actually Like to Attend
If you’ve never been to a pub theatre, the experience takes a moment to adjust to.
You arrive at a pub that looks entirely ordinary. You get a drink. You find a seat in a small room — sometimes folding chairs, sometimes fixed benches, sometimes a raked auditorium that holds fewer than a hundred people. The lights go down.
The intimacy changes everything. An actor’s breath is visible. A whispered line reaches every corner of the room. When something goes wrong — and occasionally it does, because these are often early-run productions or experimental work — you feel it in real time.
The Old Red Lion seats around seventy people upstairs. Most London pub theatres are similar. This is theatre at its most fundamental: people in a room, telling stories.
If you’re planning your first visit to London, a pub theatre evening is one of those experiences that won’t appear in most guidebooks but stays with you longer than almost anything else. Book a ticket for an evening performance, arrive early enough to order a pint, and let London surprise you.
Where to Find London’s Pub Theatres
The King’s Head Theatre is still running on Upper Street in Islington — one of the longest-running pub theatres in the world. It’s now in a dedicated space but the spirit is unchanged.
The Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court occupies one room above a Victorian pub. It has a reputation for premiering international work and reviving forgotten British plays. Critics take it seriously, and audiences keep coming back.
The Hope Theatre and the Omnibus Theatre in Clapham carry the same ethos: small-scale, bold, and never dull. And then there are the pubs that host occasional readings, one-night performances and literary evenings without having a dedicated space at all — because that’s how the whole tradition started.
London’s theatre scene has always had more going on than the marquee names on Shaftesbury Avenue suggest. The East End’s theatrical history goes back just as far, and the two traditions — grand music hall and intimate pub performance — have been intertwined for generations.
Why the Tradition Endures
London’s pub theatres cost very little to attend. Tickets for many productions run to fifteen or twenty pounds — often less than a cinema. The bar stays open before the show, at the interval, and after.
This is theatre that has chosen to remain accessible. It hasn’t moved into glass-walled arts centres or priced itself out of reach. It stayed in the pub, with the dart board and the real ale and the fruit machine humming in the corner downstairs.
There’s something quietly radical about that. In a city where arts funding is always uncertain and venue costs keep climbing, the pub theatre endures because a room above a bar is cheap to rent and a wooden chair is still a seat in the stalls.
Six hundred years after the first tavern opened on St John Street, the Old Red Lion is still doing what it has always done: serving drinks, and asking whether you have tickets for upstairs. Some traditions deserve to last.
Join 3,000+ London Lovers
Every week, get London’s hidden gems, culture, and travel inspiration — straight to your inbox.
Love more? Join 65,000 Ireland lovers → · Join 43,000 Scotland lovers → · Join 30,000 Italy lovers →
Free forever · One email per week · Unsubscribe anytime
London has grander theatres than this. But somewhere above a Victorian pub in Islington, on a wet Tuesday evening, someone is watching a play that will change the way they see the world. That’s always been how London works best.