Why you should experience Fox & Anchor in London, England.
Fox & Anchor is an atmospheric pub with rooms where Clerkenwell's market culture, Art Nouveau craftsmanship, early-morning drinking tradition and Victorian commercial character converge beside Smithfield.
Set along Charterhouse Street near St. John Street and just steps from Smithfield Market, the present building dates to 1898, when architect Latham Augustus Withall designed a four-storey public house built by W. H. Lascelles & Co. Ceramic artist W. J. Neatby, later responsible for the sumptuous tilework of Harrods Food Hall, designed the polychromatic terracotta and faience decoration manufactured by Doulton & Co. of Lambeth, including the extraordinary shaped gable where a fox and anchor flank a stylized tree. The public house continued a much older drinking tradition at the address, replacing an earlier Fox & Anchor demolished in 1897 whose name had been established by 1756 after predecessors known as the Rose and Crown and Blue Anchor. The result is a pub where Latham Augustus Withall, W. J. Neatby, Doulton & Co. and more than two centuries of licensed hospitality preserve Clerkenwell's relationship with craftsmanship, commerce and the nocturnal rhythms of Smithfield.
What you should know about Fox & Anchor.
Fox & Anchor is best known for receiving Grade II protection on September 29, 1972 as an exceptional surviving example of Art Nouveau-influenced pub architecture, with Historic England identifying its buff and colored terracotta and faience, Jacobean-style pilasters, canted wooden bay, original panelled dado, decorative aprons, egg-and-dart frieze and surviving engraved glass among the building's significant fabric. CAMRA additionally places Fox & Anchor on its National Inventory with One Star for an interior of special national historic interest, where a long servery incorporates a pewter-topped counter, carved wooden bar-back and bevelled mirrors while the rear Fox's Den leads into three compact snugs. A substantial 1993 restoration renewed parts of the interior before Cunning Plan acquired the property in 2007 as its first venture, combining the historic public house with boutique accommodation upstairs. Young's purchased Fox & Anchor in 2014, bringing the pub into the orbit of the Wandsworth brewing company founded by Charles Young and Anthony Bainbridge in 1831, while the property now contains six bedrooms above the drinking rooms. The Grade II designation, CAMRA National Inventory recognition, 1993 restoration, Cunning Plan conversion, 2014 Young's acquisition and six-room hotel program give Fox & Anchor an unusually traceable progression from Victorian public house to contemporary inn without severing the architectural character of its 1898 rebuilding.
Smithfield Market provides the defining social history behind the pub, whose early opening tradition developed around meat porters finishing overnight shifts when conventional London working days were only beginning. The Victoria and Albert Museum has examined Fox & Anchor as part of this wider relationship between public houses and Smithfield labor, including the pub's unusual pewter bar and compartmentalized drinking spaces within the history of London pub design. Marc Hall continues that market relationship as the pub's manager, with steak supplied directly by a Smithfield wholesaler as food has become increasingly central to the property while the historic market trade contracts. Country Life identified Fox & Anchor in 2025 as one of London's surviving early houses, preserving a culture shaped by nocturnal wholesalers even as Smithfield approaches the end of meat trading at its historic Central London site. Together, Smithfield Market, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Marc Hall and Young's sustain Fox & Anchor as a rare surviving expression of the social ecosystem that developed around generations of overnight meat trading.
How to fold Fox & Anchor into your trip.
Fox & Anchor works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing monastic London, Victorian market architecture and postwar cultural ambition through Clerkenwell and Smithfield.
Begin at The Charterhouse, where the site developed from a Carthusian monastery founded in 1371 beside a Black Death burial ground before passing through Tudor dissolution, the household of Sir Edward North and Thomas Sutton's seventeenth-century charitable foundation, compressing centuries of religious, political and philanthropic history into the precinct immediately east of the pub. Continue to Smithfield Market, where Sir Horace Jones designed the great Central Market buildings opened in 1868 after centuries of livestock trading in the surrounding district, creating the iron, glass and polychromatic architectural environment that ultimately shaped the working culture served by Fox & Anchor. Conclude at Barbican Centre, where Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's vast postwar Barbican development culminated in an arts complex opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1982, bringing concert halls, theaters, cinemas, galleries and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama into the rebuilt City. The progression moves from medieval Carthusian London through Horace Jones's architecture for industrial-scale food commerce into Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's cultural complex, revealing the succession of religious, mercantile and artistic institutions surrounding Fox & Anchor.
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