I recently stumbled across a TikTok of Marcus Wareing – twinkle-eyed culinarian and straight foil to Gregg Wallace’s gurning Victorian strongman act on Masterchef: The Professionals – being asked for his favourite pub. Wareing plumped for the Rose & Crown, an old coaching inn nestled in the suburban safety of Wimbledon Village. His answer twigged a deep Proustian memory in me, of travelling up to the hills of the Village as a young rapscallion, chasing girls called Imogen or Clementine whose fathers worked in high finance, and drinking MD 20/20 on Wimbledon Common until we’d vomit.
We would invariably try and get served in the Rose & Crown at some point, and almost always got turned away. But we had heard whispers from friends’ older brothers of a legendary eight-pub crawl around the Common and we wanted to get in on the action. We didn’t know it at the time, but the crawl they were referring to was the ‘Wimbledon Eight’, a boozy odyssey around the Village devised in the early 1960s by actor, drinker and SW19 native Oliver Reed. The premise was simple and spoke to Reed’s love of an alcoholic challenge: get around the course in as quick a time as possible, drinking a pint in each boozer. The last person back to the pub you started from had to get the ninth round in.
Reed’s inebriated antics are well-documented. That he once drank 106 pints in two days (sometimes given as 24 hours) on his stag weekend. That he once climbed on to a restaurant table, dropped his trousers and paraded his tattooed member around, referring to it as his ‘mighty mallet’. That, during a break in the filming of Gladiator in Malta, he walked into an Irish pub and drank eight pints of lager, 12 shots of rum, half a bottle of whisky and several cognacs, challenged and beat five Royal Navy sailors in an arm wrestling competition, and then promptly had a heart attack and died.
But, as a lover of flâneuring three sheets to the wind, it was the legend of the Wimbledon Eight that fascinated me the most, and so when the time came for my next dispatch, I knew exactly where I had to go. Although there are only six pubs now (the Brewery Tap becamea Caffè Nero; the King of Denmark was demolished for a Co-op), I wanted to find out if it’s still possible to raise hell among the hydrangeas; to carouse in the leafy, aspirational heights of SW19. What are those dastardly drinking dens that Reed so revered like to get drunk in today? And so, as ever, I assembled a small party of pisstakers and embarked on a hazy journey to the outer limits of moderation and dignity.
the dog & fox
All across the country, from Walton-on-Thames to West Bridgford, the mid-tier middle-class pub is taking over. You know the type. Pink Beefeater gin and Fever Tree tonic in those ludicrous balloon glasses. Men drinking Peroni in paisley shirts and Quiksilver chino shorts. A beer garden referred to in serif silver font as ‘The Patio’. An interior stripped of much of its original charm and replaced with muted or pastel colour palettes punctuated occasionally by the odd bit of quirk – a golden pineapple here, a neon sign there. A passable if utterly forgettable food offering.
The Dog & Fox is one of those pubs. Unfortunately, as it’s the first pub on the crawl and everyone else was late, it’s also the pub I spent the most time in, putting away three pints of interchangeable continental lager in the space of just over an hour while my companions trickled in one by one. Would Oliver Reed have approved of the £7 beers and boxy charcoal wicker chairs that now populate the establishment where he first had a drink as a young man?
rose & crown
Next on the list was Wareing’s favourite, the same pub where I was frequently turned away as a 15-year-old. I’m now 32, and although I’m confronted daily with the grey-haired spectre of my own mortality, happily I have no problem at all getting served. You can see why the Rose & Crown might appeal to a TV chef. It’s got that kind of rustic everyman vibe that’s tapped into by so many of them – it’s a cheeky bit of slow-cooked Moroccan-spiced lamb; it’s a bottle of ice cold Heineken and a matey chat; it’s Tom Kerridge in Georgian brick form. And it was really, really busy on a Friday night, the generously sized garden packed full with a boisterous mix of sundressed Durham postgrads, freshly priced out of Clapham, and the slightly older, pudgy natives.
But do you know what? I didn’t hate it. For all the pub’s chargrilled celeriac or honeydew melon gazpacho, there was this sense that there was some Reedian depravity bubbling gently under the surface. A glass was accidentally smashed on the garden concrete, accompanied by a chorus of sarcastic hollering. A group of lads in gilets got a round of sambucas in.
