Pubs with Rooms in Clapham and Wandsworth

Clapham and Wandsworth sit side by side in south-west London. Clapham is centred on its Common, with the Windmill on its south side; Wandsworth, a couple of miles west, was the home of Young’s Brewery until 2006, and it still has Young’s pubs on its High Street and East Hill.

The Windmill is the landmark: CAMRA dates it to 1665, a sprawling landmark pub on the Common, much extended in the 19th century, with 42 rooms. In Wandsworth the Alma and the Spread Eagle describe themselves as Victorian pubs, with 23 and 21 rooms, and the Brewer’s Inn on East Hill, with 16, calls itself one of the original five Young’s pubs in Wandsworth.

This is the area to choose if you want a lot of rooms, a dog, and a pub that is also a proper local. It is not central: Wandsworth Town is about 10 minutes from Waterloo by train, and Clapham Common is on the Northern line.

The documented stories here are about beer, the Blitz and Windrush. Young’s bought the Ram Brewery in Wandsworth in 1831 and brewed there until 25 September 2006; the company liked to call it the oldest brewing site in continuous operation, but that is the brewery’s own boast, and the dates for its origins (a pub called the Ram on the site is said to go back to 1533) vary between sources. Underneath Clapham Common, the Clapham South deep shelter, built in the Second World War, housed some of the Caribbean migrants who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948, a link that is well recorded and often tied to Brixton’s later growth. The Windmill takes its name from a windmill on the Common whose exact site is now lost, and a story that the founder of the Scouts drafted his first guide in an upstairs room there has no second source; Baden-Powell is better tied to Wimbledon’s windmill. We found no ghost or tunnel story for the four pubs that we could trace to a source.