The Approach Tavern

About The Approach Tavern

A gastropub facing Victoria Park with a beer garden, unusual for housing The Approach, a contemporary art gallery that has operated in its upper rooms since 1997.

The Approach Tavern sits on Approach Road directly opposite the western edge of Victoria Park, and combines a well-regarded gastropub downstairs with something genuinely unusual for a London local: The Approach, a contemporary art gallery that has run in the pub's first-floor rooms since 1997, showing emerging and mid-career artists to a specialist art-world audience quite separate from the drinkers below. The arrangement has made the pub a minor fixture on the East London gallery circuit, with private views upstairs sometimes spilling down into the bar. At ground level it trades as a straightforward, well-kept gastropub with a beer garden that catches the afternoon crowd heading to or from Victoria Park, alongside a loyal base of Bethnal Green locals. The combination of destination gallery and neighbourhood boozer under one roof, without either side compromising the other, is rare enough to be one of the pub's main talking points.