An illustrated guide to the pub cats of north London
Gracie Lofthouse tracks down London's taproom tabbies
We don’t publish too many guides here at London in Bits. If you’re not very careful they can veer a little too close to the territory marked ‘listicle’, and nobody wants that. But we do enjoy reading highly personal, subjective takes on London so, to that end, we have made a promise to start publishing more shamelessly biased guides to the city.
And we’re starting with cats.
There have been a few articles written about London’s pub-based felines over the years (catsicles?), but many of them are second or even third hand accounts that are out of date before they’re even published and lack any of the sly charm of their subjects. So, when artist and writer Gracie Lofthouse offered to embark on a cat safari of north London for us, armed only with her sketchbook and bag of Dreamies, we took her up on the offer.
Let us know if you like it and maybe we can convince her to travel to south London… Or find some dogs?
I recently moved out of my parents’ house and I really miss the company of our two cats. I doubt they miss me (the cats, not my parents), but that’s ok: I like how their displays of affection are very much on their terms. They feel spontaneous.
As much as I love cats though, I’ve never really been into the idea of cat cafes. I went to one in Tokyo a few years ago and there was something kind of weird about watching a grown ass man kneel down and desperately dangle a toy fishing rod in front of a bunch of disinterested cats. But when a friend sent me a Google Maps list of UK cat pubs (that is, pubs that are pubs in their own right, and just happen to have a cat that either lives there or visits regularly) I was very excited.
A pub seemed like the ideal setting for a more authentic cat encounter: somewhere you might actually be for reasons that are not so transparently centred around a cat. You could almost pretend to yourself that you had not deliberately engineered the entire thing to meet the cat and maintain some semblance of dignity.
After seeing that there is enough of a concentration around Camden to form a not-too-strenuous walkable tour (turns out cats have the same taste as goths and Spanish tourists) I gather together a cat safari team to make an exploratory trip. One is definitely more of a dog person, one used to own an actual horse and one is mildly allergic to cats, but together we feel we have the necessary enthusiasm and constitution needed to see us through.
And that’s how we end up at The Pineapple in Kentish Town, on a cold, Saturday afternoon in February, hoping to catch a glimpse of Patrick.
Round 1: Camden
The Pineapple is on a lovely backstreet that looks like it could just as easily be in Portobello. It’s a very pretty, bright blue pub. I could imagine myself coming here regularly. I could definitely imagine a cat coming here.
We are drinking pints of Neck Oil. Somebody at the other end of the bar bends over and reaches for the floor. ‘Cat!’ we think, but it’s a false alarm (he’d dropped his phone). After a very pleasant but cat-free hour, we ask someone at the bar if they have a cat, which feels a bit like cheating, but it does manage to get us the information that there isn’t one here right now (though they might soon, when the cat-owning manager moves nearby).
Suddenly we’re two pints in and catless before we even leave our first stop.
We head to the Tapping the Admiral, about a fifteen-minute walk away and, as soon as we walk in, we spot 11-year-old Nelson. He has his own little chaise longue by the fire. He seems very happy. He lets us pet him. I hear lots of people greet him by name. The bartender tells us he turned up when he was six months old and never left.
We sip our pints, take a moment to calm down after seeing our first cat, and turn our attention to the pub’s nautically-themed decor.
There are pictures on the walls of sailors and Des O’Connor. This leads to googling. Is Des O’Connor still alive? No. What does ‘tapping the admiral’ mean? Even though another term for it is ‘bleeding the monkey’, amazingly it doesn’t mean wanking - it’s sucking liquor from a cask through a straw. According to legend, Nelson was bottled up in a jar of brandy when he died to preserve his body and that wasn’t gross enough to stop the sailors from drinking some.
After tapping the admiral Nelson on his furry little head one last time, we walk about five minutes to Quinn’s, a very long, dimly lit bar on the Kentish Town Road. I could not imagine a cat willingly spending time here, I think, it feels a bit too open plan (I am, it seems, properly getting into the mindset of a cat). We wait while the barmaid pours 18 baby Guinness shots for a man from Essex who tells us he is also doing a tour of Camden pubs (his is not based around cats).
Is there a cat here, I ask the barmaid? Yes, she says, a very small one. Do you know where? She goes to find the manager, and then comes back to tell us they aren’t sure where he is at the moment but that we should check outside. I check: no sign of a cat, although I’m not really sure what that could be, other than an actual cat.
This is the problem with cats: you can’t guarantee they’re going to be in. They like to do their own thing. Especially if it’s a Friday or a weekend - basically, any time that you are likely to be free and going to a pub. Big noisy rooms of humans aren’t really ideal for cats.
We walk around the corner to the Old Eagle. Like the Admiral, it’s another lovely pub with eccentric decor - there are various instruments hanging from the ceiling and, encouragingly, a cat-themed bathroom (it’s also got The Simpsons’ living room painted on its outside wall). I ask the bartender about their alleged cat. He tells me that they haven’t seen Churchill today but he might make an appearance later.
He does not.
We finish up at The Sheephaven Bay, an Irish pub with loads of sports-related memorabilia on its walls. There’s a gigantic screen showing a hurling match. There’s definitely a resident cat - I know this because I’ve seen recent pics online - but it’s so rammed, we don’t even bother looking. Or we forget. We are quite drunk at this point.
In summary: we’ve been to five pubs and seen one fucking cat.
We’ve had a great night though. Someone remarks how nice it has been to visit pubs what you’d never normally visit. Everyone agrees. We’d never have set off on a Camden pub crawl if it weren’t for the cats.
Round 2: Walthamstow & Tottenham
Undeterred, I decide to try again, and drag a friend out on a Thursday night, figuring it might be a bit quieter and cat-friendly.
My instincts are proved right and this trip is a massive success. Two places, two cats. And we even see a dog.
Our first stop is The Nags Head in Walthamstow. We’ve been here before, a while ago, but we’ve never seen a cat. Turns out this place is actually well known for cats. A friend told us there was an actual cat wedding here. It’s true - I mean, as far as cat weddings can be verifiable. Billie married Harvey at a ceremony on 29 April, 2011.
As we walk in, we see an adorable little tabby with big kitten-ish eyes being fussed over by the staff. The bartender sees us looking, scoops the cat up and brings him over to us. His name is Henry Augustus Westwood (the cat, not the bartender), because the landlady likes the names Henry and Augustus (but not Gus) and is a fan of Vivienne Westwood.
Henry has his own heart-shaped cat flap going from the bar area to backstage. He is very friendly. He wanders about weaving between people’s legs, stopping for pets, trying to steal food.
I’d never really paid attention to the decor in The Nag’s Head before, but it’s definitely eccentric. Pink walls, neon signs, pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Vivienne Westwood and, oh yeah, Billie the cat, 2005-2022. There’s a shrine that invites you to light a candle in her memory. We order two pints, pizzas and a side of chips, and it’s as tasty as you expect it to be: no more, no less. It also means that Henry curls up on the plush red seat next to us and stays there for the whole time, hoping for a cheeky chip.
We get the tube to Tottenham Hale and go to The Volunteer, a Spurs pub tucked behind an incredibly grim, mega busy road. I know this area well (I live nearby) and it’s not pretty, but this pub is an absolute gem. It didn’t turn up on any of the online lists of cat pubs, but a friend tipped us off. It’s a proper local pub, not somewhere you’d stumble across by chance.
As we walk in, we see a gigantic Rottweiler pup stretched out on the floor behind the bar (his name is Bodhi and he is a gentle giant, except when he’s winding up his fellow resident pub dog, Billy). We get talking to the barmaid, who goes to get Eve, the landlady.
After a while, Eve comes down with Tommy, a beautiful nine-month-old blue British shorthair. Tommy stretches out in front of us and we give him all the belly rubs while Eve chats away to us about the pub’s history.
Eve’s been there for 38 years. She’s had a few pets in that time, and the locals love them. She even gets emails from people around the world asking how the animals are doing. Eve reckons it’s got something to do with the fact that so many people live in flats nowadays and can’t keep pets, so they really miss them.
Eve also has a parrot, though she doesn’t bring him down anymore. He kept telling people to “shut the fuck up” if they were being too loud.
Round 3: Archway
It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m arranging a drink with a mate who lives in South London, so naturally I ask him to come all the way to Archway to maybe see a cat.
I might have caught the ‘cat spotting’ bug.
We walk up a long stretch of motorway leading to The Charlotte Despard (who was a suffragist, I learn on Google.) As soon as we walk inside, we spot a cat bowl. Thank God. We get two pints, sit down and there he is: Legz, a big ginger boy with three legs, sitting by the beer barrels.
I bend down to give him a pat, which he tolerates for a bit before biting my hand.
Legz was a rescue who had to have one of his legs removed after being hit by a car. “He’s very old,” the barmaid tells me. “Doesn’t like people. But he loves Dreamies,” she says, offering me one to offer him. So I do, and he nibbles it, before launching at my hand again. This is exactly what I like about cats; they will assert their autonomy with a little ‘fuck you’ bite or scratch whenever they please.
You've got to respect that.
Round 4: Holborn & King’s Cross
Our final excursion is on a Friday night so I’m not very optimistic, but I’ve done extensive online research and create a detailed itinerary with strict timings (and drink allowances), starting with The Seven Stars in Holborn, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice.
This is a proper historic pub, dating back to 1602. It’s got film posters, caricatures and old photos of London on the walls, and chequered tablecloths and is also home to the famous cat, Clement Attlee, who wears an adorable Elizabethan ruff.
We can’t see Clement anywhere, so we ask the barmaid. There’s a cat upstairs, she says - The General - he’s a different one: the manager took Clement Atlee home over lockdown and he won’t come back. The General’s been here since September 2022.
I ascend the rickety staircase that takes punters to the loo and there he is, a massive black cat curled up on a chair in the office. The General opens one big sleepy yellow eye and I give him a pet. I fawn over him for a bit and eventually he has enough and the claws come out. Except he hooks himself onto my jumper sleeve so I can’t really leave, and we just sit outside the loos like this for a while
It’s a great start, but at the next two stops we draw a blank. At McGlynn’s on Whidborne Street there is actually a cat, the bartender tells me, but Jackie doesn’t come down in the evenings anymore because she’s very old and has been in and out of the vets all week. While at The Scottish Stores on the Caledonian Road (which used to be a strip club) there is no longer a cat, because it belonged to the previous manager. Of the pub. Not the strip club.
It’s not about the cats
We have visited 11 pubs over four trips and seen five cats. And although that’s enough to constitute a ‘clowder’ we all agree that encountering the cats is almost secondary (which is good news - as you’d probably end up seeing more cats if you chose to do literally anything other than a tour of London’s pub cats).
But the beauty of doing a tour like this is that it takes you to places you might never have thought to go. It reshuffles the city for you, opening it up in new ways. After all, London can be a bit overwhelming. We’re so completely spoiled with amazing options for where to spend our time that it can sometimes bring on choice paralysis.
So, there’s something quite nice about having a list of places readily curated for you. Something liberating in letting that decision be dictated by a theme rather than doing extensive research to try and find THE VERY BEST PLACE for a couple of post-work drinks with your mates.
If you give yourself over to an arbitrary theme, then you will discover places that aren’t necessarily all about their food or even their beer. They have something else.
All the places we visited on this safari had a charm that’s hard to put your finger on. Sure, there’s the fact that if a place has an animal, then it’s more likely to be family-run and is probably going to have a more personable, local vibe. But it hasn’t just been that. It’s more that the vibe isn’t just one thing.
I imagine there’s a lot of pressure nowadays for businesses to build up a brand to attract customers, but the thing about a brand is that it relies on a type of cohesive character that people can recognise immediately. But actual, proper character is more complicated than that. It’s an eclectic mix of influences; of things that don’t necessarily make sense when put together (Henry Augustus Westwood is kind of the fluffy embodiment of that).
It is, ultimately, more like a cat - prickly, inconsistent, contrary. And that’s hard to replicate in a way that doesn’t come across as incredibly contrived.
So go on a cat pub safari. You might see a cat. You probably won’t. Embrace the uncertainty.
You can find more of Gracie’s art (including more pictures of pub cats we couldn’t fit into this issue) on Instagram.
5 little bits
A few days after over 900 survivors, bereaved family members and residents agreed a settlement of their civil claims over the Grenfell Tower fire, some of those same people have urged both the National Theatre and the BBC to drop productions based on the disaster. The petition to stop the BBC from making their drama has now received over 50,000 signatures.
In related news, a new poll has found that 16% of people in London live in substandard accommodation, which is defined as “not in a good state of repair, where heating, electrics or plumbing are not in good working order, and where damp is present”. That 16% is “double the proportion in many other parts of the UK”.
According to a poll by a ‘recruitment software firm’ “half of Londoners have been handed a job because of personal connections,” giving us the highest rate of ‘Nepo workers‘ in the country. 53% of Londoners questioned said they “disagree with the idea of getting a job through connections ‘on principle’” but more than 80% said they would “take advantage of a personal connection in order to advance their career”.
Some photos of the ‘topping out’ of Canary Wharf have been found, after being presumed lost for the past 30 years. The photo were taken from a wooden box suspended by a crane 250m in the air, and might make your palms go a bit sweaty.
The Sylvanian Families shop in Highbury closes at the end of this week after 30 years of business. The Guardian has interviewed the owner and some of the shop’s loyal customers.
This was brilliant thank you. Please continue with a South and East iteration!
Great pic of Legz thank you