42 Clerkenwell Green
Clerkenwell
London
EC1R 0EG
020 7523 4973
The Crown Tavern sits right on Clerkenwell Green, which is no longer a village green with grass, but still a welcome open space in Central London (photo 1). It was a regular of mine when I worked around the corner and was a favourite on a summer evening sitting outside on the Green. As Clerkenwell has become cool in recent years it’s now a place to be seen and gets pretty full weekday evenings.
The pub was built in the early 19th century and had a typical late Victorian upgrade probably in the 1890s. A bar back survives from that time along with enough old partitions to create separate drinking areas. There is some original door glass which shows that there was once a ‘Private Saloon’ for the better class of customer (photo 2). There are also some much more recent good quality cut glass windows advertising gin, rum and vodka
Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, lived in Clerkenwell and the newspaper Iskra was produced in Clerkenwell Green. Officially, Lenin first met Stalin in Finland in 1905 but it’s reckoned that they actually first met at a meeting in the Crown in 1903 when Stalin came to the UK to study Bolshevism.
What’s not in doubt is that a scene from the 2006 film Notes On A Scandal, where the characters played by Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett meet, is filmed in the Crown.
The eighteenth century Grade II* listed St James Church is right behind the pub (photo 1) and the Middlesex Sessions House and the Marx Memorial Library can be seen from the pub garden.
