The Palm Tree

About The Palm Tree

A Grade II-listed 1930s pub that survives alone on a grassy island inside Mile End Park, after wartime bombing and subsequent slum clearance removed the streets that once surrounded it.

The Palm Tree was built in the 1930s as an ordinary corner pub serving the dense terraced streets of Mile End Old Town, but the neighbourhood around it was devastated by Second World War bombing and later cleared entirely as part of post-war slum clearance, leaving the pub standing entirely alone on what is now a grassy mound inside Mile End Park, reached by a small footbridge with no other buildings in sight. That isolation has become its defining feature and its charm: the pub kept its unaltered 1930s interior largely intact, including original fittings, and has become known for regular live jazz and swing nights that pull crowds out into the park itself on summer evenings. Its position inside the park, rather than on any street, means almost all its trade arrives on foot via the Regent's Canal towpath or Grove Road, giving it a genuinely secluded, almost rural atmosphere for a pub barely ten minutes from Mile End tube station.