The Grapes

About The Grapes

A tiny, 18th-century Thames-side pub on Narrow Street, long thought to have inspired Dickens' 'Six Jolly Fellowship Porters' and bought in 2011 by Sir Ian McKellen to save it from redevelopment.

Dating in its current form to around the 1720s, on a site licensed for drinking far longer, the Grapes is one of the last surviving fragments of old riverside Limehouse, a narrow, low-ceilinged building squeezed onto Narrow Street with a tiny wooden balcony jutting directly out over the Thames. It has long been identified as the likely model for the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, and its walls carry the weight of that literary association alongside more than two centuries of riverside trade. In 2011, facing the threat of redevelopment, the pub was bought by the actor Sir Ian McKellen together with the director Sean Mathias and the media proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, who have kept it trading as an unpretentious, traditional free house rather than converting it into anything grander. Its minuscule river terrace, seating only a handful of people, remains one of the most atmospheric riverside drinking spots left in London.