Most London pubs turn their backs to the Thames. The river is there, somewhere behind the buildings, but you wouldn’t know it from the bar. The pubs on this crawl are different. They face the water, they open onto it, and the water changes everything about how they work — the light, the noise, the way people drink. You sit outside at the Founders Arms with St Paul’s Cathedral filling the frame across the river, or on the Mayflower’s wooden jetty watching the tide pull at the pilings, and the pint in your hand is doing something a pint in a landlocked pub simply cannot do.

We’ve walked this route four or five times now, Blackfriars to Rotherhithe, and the thing that keeps surprising us is how quickly the riverside changes character. You start at the Black Friar on the north bank — Arts and Crafts mosaics, marble monks, commuters pouring out of the station — and within twenty minutes of crossing Blackfriars Bridge you’re on the South Bank proper, passing Tate Modern, weaving through tourists outside Shakespeare’s Globe. By the time you reach the Anchor Bankside there’s been a pub on that site since the 1600s, when Bankside was London’s entertainment district: theatres, bear pits, brothels, and alehouses serving the lot. Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire from a tavern here in 1666. Dr Johnson drank at the Anchor with Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith. The history stacks up without you having to look for it.

Then the route turns east past London Bridge and something shifts. The crowds thin. The architecture gets rawer — old wharves, converted warehouses, stretches of river wall where you can hear the water. The Horniman at Hays sits inside what was once the largest wharf in the Port of London, known as the Larder of London for all the tea and provisions that passed through it. Keep going into Bermondsey and Rotherhithe and you’re walking through what was, until the 1970s, working dockland. The Old Justice, The Angel, The Mayflower — these are pubs that served watermen, dockers, and sailors. Captain Cook and Samuel Pepys both drank at The Angel’s site. The Mayflower stands where the Pilgrim Fathers’ ship was moored before it left for America in 1620.

The practical shape of the crawl is straightforward. Nine pubs, about three miles on foot, mostly along the Thames Path. The first six — the core route from the Black Friar to the Horniman — take three to four hours at a comfortable pace, and you’re never far from a Tube station if you want to bail. The last three are bonus pubs, further east along Bermondsey Wall and into Rotherhithe, and they add an hour. They’re also the best pubs on the route. The Angel is a Samuel Smith’s house — cash only, no music, cheap pints — with a balcony where Turner supposedly painted The Fighting Temeraire. The Mayflower has a wooden jetty that hangs over the river at high tide and real ales that earned it back-to-back CAMRA Pub of the Year awards in 2024 and 2025.

Start after lunch. Walk east. The sun will be behind you for most of the afternoon and in your face by the time you reach Rotherhithe, which is exactly what you want if you’re finishing on the Mayflower’s jetty at sunset.