Pubs with Rooms in Hammersmith, Fulham and Olympia

This stretch of west London works as a base for the exhibition and music venues around Olympia and the Hammersmith Apollo, and for the Thames riverside at Hammersmith Bridge. The area is largely residential, and the pubs are neighbourhood places first.

The Hand & Flower is the Victorian one: CAMRA records that the pub is said to date from the 17th century as the Rose & Crown and was renamed in 1787, with the present building from 1888. It has ten rooms. The Brook Green, a three-storey former coaching inn on Shepherd’s Bush Road, has 17 rooms and a cellar cocktail bar. Aragon House at Parsons Green is the grandest building: a Grade II listed Georgian house of 1805-6, now a bar and restaurant with 15 rooms, so it feels more like a restaurant with rooms than a traditional pub.

Distances to the Tube are modest rather than trivial: Kensington (Olympia) is about 6 minutes from the Hand & Flower, Parsons Green about 5 from Aragon House, and Hammersmith about 10 from the Brook Green. Expect busy evenings below the rooms.

The big stories here belong to the river rather than to these three pubs. The Dove on the Upper Mall is the pub most often tied to the song “Rule, Britannia!”: the story goes that the poet James Thomson wrote the words there, a claim that is hedged even by its tellers, though the song itself was certainly first performed in 1740 at Cliveden. The Boat Race runs from Putney to Mortlake and passes under Hammersmith Bridge, which is why the riverside pubs fill on race day; the present bridge is Bazalgette’s work of the 1880s and has been closed to motor traffic since 2019. Olympia, opposite the Hand & Flower, opened in 1884 as the National Agricultural Hall before being renamed. We found no ghost or tunnel story for the three pubs below that we could trace to a source, so what the bars tell you on a busy night is best taken as pub talk.