The Spaniards Inn

About The Spaniards Inn

A brick coaching inn dating to around 1585 at the top of Hampstead Heath — everyone assumes it is Camden, but the borough line runs right past the door and the pub itself sits in Barnet.

The Spaniards Inn was built around 1585 as the tollgate keeper’s house on the old turnpike road out to Hampstead, and its name is variously explained by a Spanish ambassador once said to have lived there or by two Spanish brothers who supposedly duelled over a woman in the garden. Dick Turpin’s father is said to have kept the inn, and the highwayman himself is remembered as a regular — a legend the pub has never discouraged, alongside a haunting attributed to his ghost. Charles Dickens sent the Pickwickians’ Mrs Bardell here for tea in The Pickwick Papers, Bram Stoker had Dracula’s wolf run loose in its garden, and Keats is said to have written part of an ode under its trees; Byron, Shelley and Joshua Reynolds all drank here too. The building sits right on the Barnet/Camden line — the old tollhouse opposite is in Camden, but the inn itself has always been in Barnet — with a large garden that runs straight onto Hampstead Heath. It now trades as part of Castle Pubs, the characterful-pub brand within the Mitchells & Butlers group, alongside sister houses like The Washington in Belsize Park.