Pubs with Rooms in Docklands and the Royal Docks

Docklands is a place of two halves. The Isle of Dogs, ringed by the Thames on three sides, still has the grid of Victorian streets that grew up around the docks at Cubitt Town, with Canary Wharf’s towers rising just north. Out east, the Royal Docks are wide stretches of water and new roads around ExCeL and London City Airport. Pubs with rooms are few and far between, but three survive.

The Waterman’s Arms is the most characterful: a Grade II listed Cubitt Town pub built as the Newcastle Arms, with references from 1853, that Daniel Farson ran in the early 1960s as a music-hall-style Waterman’s Arms. It reopened in 2020 as a pub and boutique hotel with seven rooms, five minutes from the foot tunnel and the DLR. The Ship Inn on Westferry Road is simpler, three rooms over a local pub.

Out at the Royal Docks, the Fox Connaught opened in 1881 as the Connaught Tavern for passengers at Victoria Dock, and is a Grade II listed red-brick building that stood closed for seventeen years before reopening as a pub in 2003. It now has eighteen rooms and is a practical base for ExCeL events and London City Airport.

The big stories here are industrial. Brunel’s giant steamship the Great Eastern was launched sideways into the Thames from the Millwall yard on 31 January 1858, and the docks were a prime Luftwaffe target in the Second World War, heavily bombed from the autumn of 1940. The name of the Isle of Dogs is a genuine puzzle: the old tale of Edward III’s royal greyhounds is doubted, and other candidates include a corruption of “Isle of Ducks”, Dutch engineers, gibbets on the foreshore, and a 1597 play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe that landed Jonson in jail. None is proven. Dockland pubs also collect sailor and ghost stories, and we label every one of those as legend, not history.