Pubs with Rooms in Southwark, Waterloo and Lambeth

Southwark has long been London’s other bank, and the South Bank is now its cultural heart: Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside, Southwark Cathedral and Borough Market a few streets inland, and the Shard standing over all of it. The pubs that let rooms here are not the famous old coaching inns of Borough High Street but a Fuller’s house on Stamford Street, a corner pub opposite Waterloo station and a gastropub at Kennington Cross.

The Mad Hatter is the biggest, with thirty rooms above a ground-floor pub, and the one with a story: the building began as the Tress & Co hat factory in the mid-19th century, and the name is a nod to the old saying that hatters went mad. The Wellington sits directly opposite Waterloo, which makes it the easiest of the three to reach by train and a useful base for an early departure. The Tommyfield is the odd one out: six rooms upstairs from a pub that also runs a comedy club, at Kennington Cross, not far from the Oval.

All three are big, busy pubs, so these are rooms above a working bar rather than a quiet country inn. In exchange you get a short walk to the river and a Tube station within minutes of the door.

Southwark’s legends mostly come from its time as the rowdy suburb outside the City’s walls. The Tabard inn on Borough High Street is where Chaucer sets the start of the Canterbury Tales (it burned in 1676 and was later pulled down, but a plaque survives in Talbot Yard), and Bankside was home to the Globe and the other playhouses, to bear-baiting pits, to brothels licensed under the Bishop of Winchester, and to the Clink prison. Stories that Shakespeare drank at the George, or that Dickens knew the area’s inns, are widely repeated; Dickens certainly set scenes round the Borough (the Marshalsea prison features in Little Dorrit) but a named pub visit is rarely provable. On each pub’s page we label the stories as documented, local legend or disputed.