Pubs with Rooms in Wimbledon

Wimbledon is two places. Down by the station it is a busy suburban town centre; up the hill is Wimbledon Village, a small high street of boutiques and pubs that gives onto Wimbledon Common, with its windmill and miles of paths. All three pubs here are in or beside the Village, so you trade a walk or a short bus ride from the station for being by the Common and ten minutes from the tennis club.

The Dog & Fox, on the High Street, is the biggest, with 25 rooms; its own website says it was commissioned by Earl Spencer in the late 1700s, though it admits that may be rumour. The Rose & Crown, also on the High Street, has 13 rooms. The Fox & Grapes, on Camp Road at the edge of the Common, is Wimbledon’s only independent pub with rooms by its own account, and the one right on the Common.

The Fox & Grapes says it has no dedicated parking and points to paid parking on the Common; we haven’t confirmed parking at the other two, so plan on train, bus or taxi.

The Common is where most of Wimbledon’s stories come from, and they are better documented than most pub tales. It was a favourite spot for duels, including Lord Cardigan’s pistol duel with Captain Tuckett in September 1840, while the Pitt and Tierney duel of 1798 was fought, bloodlessly, on neighbouring Putney Heath. Highwaymen haunted the roads too: Jerry Abershaw, hanged in 1795, gives his name to Jerry’s Hill, though the story that his body was gibbeted there rests on thinner evidence. Earl Spencer, as lord of the manor, tried to enclose the Common in 1864 and was refused, and an Act of 1871 put it in the hands of conservators; that shows the family’s grip on the area, though not that an Earl Spencer commissioned the Dog & Fox, which the pub itself calls a rumour. The Wombles, Elisabeth Beresford’s fictional litter-pickers, live on the Common in her books, and the Fox & Grapes is where fans met in 2002 to plan AFC Wimbledon.