The Black Lion

2 South Black Lion Lane
London W6 9TJ

020 8748 2639

We started this blog five years ago to chronicle our attempt to visit as many as possible of the 100 or so places to eat in Chiswick. We got about half-way in the first year, but in recent months there have been more new openings than blog posts, including at least one each year on the corner site at the High Road end of Prebend Gardens, currently occupied by Rendezvous. Not to be outdone, a local friend has worked out there are over 40 pubs in and around W4, including along the river between Kew Bridge and Hammersmith and he has enlisted the help of some Chiswick pensioners to help him visit them all. So now there's a competitive edge, we're putting our bibs back on. 

Our challenge Venn diagram overlapped at The Black Lion on a freezing cold evening in early May. Sat under its 400-year-old chestnut tree on a midsummer evening this riverside pub can be a glorious spot but, huddled inside the marquee wrapped in the pub's emergency blankets, it felt more like the saddest apres-ski bar.

The Black Lion is a Grade II listed pub thought to date back to the 1750s, when the German George II was King. According to a plaque at the pub, formerly known as the Black Lyon, the site was originally a piggery. The pig farmer started brewing beer for himself and his friends and it proved so popular that it overtook his agricultural interests as his main occupation.

In 1803 frequent sightings of a 'ghost' occurred around Black Lion Lane and St Paul's Churchyard. A tall, white-clad figure would hang around the churchyard, springing out at women and “wrapping its spectral arms” around them. On 3 January 1804, Francis Smith, an excise officer, filled his blunderbuss with shot - and himself with ale - before firing at an unfortunate, white-clothed bricklayer, Thomas Millwood, whom he had mistaken for the ghost. Realising what he had done, he took the injured man back to the Black Lion where a doctor pronounced him dead. What happened to the original pale spectre is not known, but it is Millwood’s ghost that is now said to haunt the pub. Smith was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to a year’s hard labour after it was successfully argued that he honestly believed Millwood to be a ghost.

These days the pub's location on the north bank of the Thames makes it an ideal place for watching the Boat Race, or if that sounds a bit too elitist you can book its famous skittle alley for parties. In 2017 the business was acquired by the Laine Pub Company, part of a package of six London sites it acquired for £4 million. The company has its own brewery in Adversane, Sussex, where it brews its "unfiltered, unpasteurised and uncompromising" ales, including Quiet One Table Beer, Eat More Buttons Salted Caramel Stout and Mangolicious Pale Ale. 

We'd worked up a considerable thirst on the walk down to the river and while most of our group decided to stick with good-old Fuller's, brewed 700 yards west of the beer garden, I elected for Laine's Doubloon Golden Ale, ignoring the obvious signs that it wasn't really a Golden Ale kind of evening. With the bar out of bounds, it didn't take us any longer than 15 minutes to download the 'order at table' app, enter our contact details, create a password we'll never remember, upload our payment details and order some beers. Isn't technology great?

Between the five of us we probably tallied about 300 years, significantly increasing the average age of this popular venue for twenty somethings, which seems to have had a very good lockdown, much to the annoyance of some of its neighbours along Hammersmith Terrace. In the old days, lads' nights conversation mainly revolved around beers, birds and balls, but now we're approaching our seventh decade it's more about bicycles, blood pressure and building plots. We kept with the B theme for the food - beef, beetroot and buttermilk chicken burgers, the last of which I can report was particularly good. (It takes a real man to order a beetroot, mushroom and goats cheese burger on a boys' night out.)

Purely for research purposes, I went back the following week, but it was barely any warmer. Next time I might try the corner table inside, which was once the regular spot of AP Herbert. The humourist, novelist and reformist MP lived on the Terrace and would have enjoyed a Quiet One Table Beer.

Food (for 4): £59.00
Drink (5 pints): £25.15
Total: £84.15