THE MAYFLOWER

THE MAYFLOWER - A LITERARY LONDON PUB

Werner?and I choose to meet at the Mayflower, as an appropriate place, to discuss the result of the US election. The Mayflower was the ship that carried the?Pilgrim Fathers. Wikipedia suggests plenty of reading material on the Mayflower ship. The pub was renamed The Mayflower when it was rebuilt in 1958.

The outside of the building is white with black wooden windows. But on our visit scaffolding was up at the front with the sign: We apologise for any inconvenience during your visit while building work is done. The ‘we’ presumably referring to The Black Dog Pub Company who run the pub.

Werner and I started outside, at the back on a jetty with views of the Thames, in case our voices became raised deliberating on President Trump. Werner drank coffee followed by diet coke. I needed something stronger so was on the Gun Brewery’s 5.1% ESB. After 20 minutes, the wooden plank floor started to flood as the tide was coming in. We didn’t want wet feet so we went inside and sat in a booth. The words on the back of the wooden seat were: Poverty and oysters always seem to go together. Charles Dickens. Pickwick Papers.

The darkened interior of the pub is attractive with a black timber bar, stained glass, a general nautical theme, antiques, carpets and candles. YouTube video: ‘Inside the Mayflower’.

For literary fans, the pub is mentioned in:

June Whitham Holroyd’s book June: Tempered Steel (2011): On Sunday mornings we would often walk over the Heath and down through the park to one of the River pubs, the Cutty Sark or the Yacht, or we would drive into Rotherhithe to The Mayflower pub.

D.D. Mayers’s book You Have Not a Leg to Stand On (2015): We picked him up in South Kensington, drove him over Tower Bridge, through all the huge derelict warehouses, to the Mayflower pub. The Mayflower ship did actually set sail to America from here, and our little warehouse nestled between two other monsters which soon would succumb to the developers.

Fred Dowd’s The Cockroach Society (2016): The Mayflower pub was located about five minutes from the hotel with the traffic. It was set in an old building with dark wood trimmings. They entered, and it was full even at this time of day. It smelled old and looked old with nautical trimmings on the walls. The wooden beams and walls looked like they had hundreds of coats of varnish on them. It was fairly narrow space with lots of small tables.

Martyn Thomas’s World in their Hands: The Story of the First Women's Rugby World Cup (2022): Perhaps unsurprisingly, given they were in an understandably celebratory mood, the trio’s first port of call was The Mayflower pub in Rotherhithe. The site of the three women clutching pints and singing heartily as they commandeered the jukebox might have been jarring for the crowd of mid-week drinkers who lined the bar, but it was their insistence on playing Queen’s ‘We are the Champions’ on repeat that landed them in trouble with management.

Charity Morsey’s book Hard Reset: Your Life to Freedom (2024): I had finished work, and I needed to write. I quickly jumped into one of the famous black Hackney carriage cabs in London, and said ‘Pleeeaaaaase take me to a place where I can get away on a Sunday, and concentrate to write.’ When I arrived, I was surprised as I looked out the window, I thought where the driver took me was a joke. It was a pub. But according to the driver, he told me, ‘This is one of the oldest and most historic pubs in the city of London, The Mayflower.’ He went on to say, ‘You’ll be inspired here.’

The Mayflower pub keeps a Descendants Book and if you can prove you are a descendant of someone on the Mayflower you can sign it!

The Mayflower, 117 Rotherhithe Street, Rotherhithe, SE16 4NF

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If you liked this article,?there are other London literary pubs listed here.