Jimmy McIntosh

There’s nothing quite like a proper London pub. Maybe we’re old romantics, but old school boozers are the beating heart of this city. After many evenings of tipsy research, we’ve done the impossible and ranked the 50 best pubs in London.  The pubs on this list are heavy with the powerful whiff of history – though that just might be the sticky carpets – and throbbing with heart, soul and community charm.  How did we decide what made the final 50? With a scary amount of the UK’s pubs closing by the week, we wanted to highlight some of this city’s less well-known and independent inns. The pubs included here are places where you’ll not only get perfect pints, but pickled eggs, epic karaoke nights and intense darts sessions. There’s no gatekeeping here at Time Out and these spots are where old-school regulars rub shoulders with the new wave of pintspeople, from Clapton to Catford, via Walthamstow, Woolwich, Peckham and more. Want cosy and convivial? You’ve come to the right place.  Of course, in a city with well over 3,000 pubs, not everything can make the cut. If you’re looking for pubs with fancy food, you’ll find them in our list of the best gastropubs in London. Wondering where London’s most legendary drinking dens are? They’re all in this list of London’s most historic pubs. Cheers. RECOMMENDED: These are the best pubs in Soho. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor, and has spent an impressive amount of time drinking in London's many pubs. She even used to

The last time I found myself in Hoxton’s The Macbeth, it was 2009, I was wearing drainpipe jeans, and I was going to see a friend’s terrible, terrible band at the tail end of the indie glory years. Sixteen years later and I’m back, splitting a bifana in roughly the same spot where I once suffered through an onslaught of angular guitars and yelped vocals. The Macbeth has a storied history. Built by the Hoxton Distillery as the White Hart in the 1800s, it got its Shakespearian moniker in the mid-noughties (presumably as a result of the ceramic mural inside depicting the Bard’s Caledonian classic). It became an important site of pilgrimage for indie kids across the capital – hosting such musical titans as Franz Ferdinand, Florence + the Machine, and, er, Iglu & Hartley.  By its end the venue had been smartened up in a manner unbefitting a divey music spot, and so it wasn’t much of a surprise when, in July of this year, the premises was taken over by Jamie Allan – the chef who co-transformed The Auld Triangle in Finsbury Park from Hibernian hoochhole into the much-feted Plimsoll – and became a gastropub serving up Portuguese-inspired small plates.  It is, our server assures us, still very much a boozer (and if you wish you can sit in at the front of the pub and sink six pints of £4.95 Macbeth Lager without eating), but the food is the star of the show here. We order eight plates, and first to arrive are the viva-grande tomatoes, which were arguably the best thing we ate all eveni