In search of London’s earliest pint

The last grocer at Covent Garden packed up his stall in 1973. The flower, fruit and vegetable market, which had operated continuously for centuries, was relocated to Nine Elms after traffic congestion made trading untenable. The site languished for decades before giving way to the smorgasbord of luxury shopping and wine bars we know today, all dutifully lined up in the shadow of the Royal Opera House. Over in The City, Leadenhall Market — which once sold game and poultry under a roof of green, maroon and cream — is now home to jewellers and bouji cheesemongers and is a favourite among tourists visiting a spot where Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was filmed.

The reinvention of our markets is one of London’s great success stories. With few left, however, the sentiment has shifted in favour of conservation. Last year’s announcement that Smithfield Market was due to relocate somewhere outside central London caused an outcry from wholesalers and customers alike. The move is due to take place before the end of the decade — albeit no earlier than 2028 — and a new site has not yet been confirmed.

A couple of wholesalers also remain on site at Borough Market. They jostle for space with more and more artisanal shops that have set up stalls in the area. There are countless cheesemongers, deli stands, bakery outposts and even one man selling truffles. Another stand sells oysters and another Dorset venison. On Park Street, one of the market’s tributaries, is a row of upmarket shops, including Aesop, Cubitts and APC. Pictures of Borough are among the first results when doing an online image search on the theme of gentrification.

At No 9, Stoney Street, The Market Porter has presided over Borough since 1799. There has been an alehouse of some description in this very spot since the 1500s, says Tony Sommerville, who has managed the pub for 19 years. It is one of London’s last remaining early houses, open from 6am every market day. A special licence, granted by the Government as an exemption to the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 (which restricted pub opening hours to specific times of day), allowed pubs catering specifically to the markets to serve nocturnal wholesalers, whose shift ran from midnight to 6am.

‘[Borough] Market has changed so much in the 19 years that I’ve been here,’ Tony says. ‘There used to be a lot more of the overnight wholesalers coming in here when I started.’ The pub was also popular with railway engineers in the 1970s, when the Jubilee line — which runs right underneath the market and links Southwark to London Bridge — was being built. Among its top customers at the time were press cutters, a now-obsolete profession where people were paid by companies to read through all the newspapers after they were published every evening, to identify all the articles in which said companies had been mentioned. Easier with a pint in hand.

The clientele has evolved considerably since those days. With only a few wholesalers left at Borough Market, the publican profile in the early hours of the morning has changed from grocer to, more typically, a nurse or a constable who has just finished the night shift, either at nearby Guy’s Hospital or the local police station. Tony is keen to stress that there is still a strong sense of community. ‘You really felt that after the terrorist attack in 2017,’ he says. The tragedy occurred just minutes down from the pub, on London Bridge. ‘One of my staff was stabbed… one of my regulars was stabbed. But it brought everyone together.

‘I still run [The Market Porter] like a backstreet local boozer,’ the manager continues. There’s a real sense of camaraderie — our publican walks his neighbour’s dog and some of the restaurants dotting the market still receive their produce fresh from the remaining wholesalers — mixed with lots of gilets. The corporate takeover of London Bridge in the past 10 years has introduced a new demographic into the backstreet-boozer mix: men in suits. Yet although their ascent seemed definitive a decade ago, their numbers are currently dwindling.

Work-from-home culture has dealt a blow to what was once a roaring trade on a Friday afternoon — prime time for any publican. This is also a problem for The Fox & Anchor (above), another early house located in Smithfield. ‘Most people who work in this neighbourhood are architects,’ explains the manager, Marc Hall. Unlike ‘his friends down the road’ whose pubs cater to bankers and consultants — and whose companies take a more intransigent line on work-from-home Fridays, in that they forbid them — Marc has a particularly tough time on the very day that used to be the pub’s busiest. ‘Before covid, it was a different world,’ he says. ‘The market was still in full swing and, when I would walk by on a Friday lunchtime, there’d be 30 or 40 market guys outside the pub. Nowadays, you get five or six.’

The Fox & Anchor opens later than The Market Porter, serving punters from 7am on weekdays and 8.30am on weekends. It’s a small pub, with only 12 tables, and ‘we get very few people coming in who are younger than 30,’ Marc notes. It has been part of Young’s Group since it was sold just over a decade ago. The parent company operates nearly 280 properties across the country and revenue is up 24.9% this year. Forced to reinvent the pub in line with the changing demographic of potential customers, Marc and his team have decided to change tack. ‘We’ve shifted the focus to food rather than drink and make the most of our proximity to Smithfield,’ he explains. The speciality, unsurprisingly, is steak, supplied directly by one of the market wholesalers. ‘Sundays are our busiest day now.’

If The Fox & Anchor seats few people, it can sleep as many as 12. It is, per the description given by its manager, a ‘pub with rooms’ (they don’t call it an inn). There are six of them, typically accommodating those who planned to stay in EC1 and found that the next-door hotel, a Malmaison, was fully booked on the dates they had to be in town. ‘We get lots of breakfast people,’ Marc explains. ‘A mix of hotel guests, some of them staying at Malmaison, but choosing to eat here, as well as some city boys.’

If early houses have, so far, been able to adapt, what happens to the market trade when it is forced to move? Will new pubs with early-house status begin to spring up in Stratford or other areas earmarked as alternatives to Smithfield’s current site? Indicatively, there aren’t any early houses in Nine Elms or Poplar, respectively home to the new Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets.

‘You would have to be mad to buy [a pub],’ wrote Jeremy Clarkson last year in The Times. Friends of the columnist advised him that they were closing ‘at the rate of more than 1,000 a year’. To buy a pub, he chuckled, would be ‘insane’. We all know how that particular sermon ended (‘So, I’ve bought a pub’), but, unless he wishes to do this again on the outskirts of east London, those reliant on places serving fry-ups and pints when their shift ends at 6am will need to find a new Magwitch.

This feature originally appeared in the November 5, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.