Trafalgar Tavern: Whitebait and Dickens by the River
Why is it significant?
Follow the river wall until you reach the building with tall bow windows jutting over the water like the stern galleries of a warship. This is the Trafalgar Tavern, built in 1837 and named, of course, after Nelson's last and greatest victory.
Key Facts
| Place | Trafalgar Tavern: Whitebait and Dickens by the River |
|---|---|
| Address | Park Row, London SE10 9NW, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.48460, -0.00420 |
| Part of Walk | Under the Thames to Longitude Zero: Maritime Greenwich, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the river wall until you reach the building with tall bow windows jutting over the water like the stern galleries of a warship. This is the Trafalgar Tavern, built in 1837 and named, of course, after Nelson's last and greatest victory. It was designed so that diners could eat with the Thames sliding past almost beneath their feet.
In Victorian times this stretch of river was famous for one dish: whitebait, tiny young fish caught in the Thames, fried crisp and eaten whole by the plateful. Every summer, at the end of the parliamentary session, government ministers came down the river to Greenwich for a whitebait dinner, a ritual that lasted for much of the nineteenth century. The story goes that the Liberals favoured this tavern while the Conservatives preferred another inn nearby, so that even the fish course had a party line.
Writers came too. Charles Dickens knew the Trafalgar well, and it is often said to be the model for the Greenwich inn where Bella and John Rokesmith hold their wedding dinner in Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, a feast of fish served dish after dish by the river. Thackeray and Wilkie Collins are said to have dined here as well.
Behind the romance flowed a filthy river. In the hot summer of 1858 the Great Stink made the Thames so foul that Parliament finally paid for Joseph Bazalgette's great sewers, and the whitebait grew scarce in these waters. The ministers' dinners faded away, and the tavern itself spent long years in the twentieth century doing other jobs before it became a pub again. The view, though, is exactly the one Dickens saw.
Lean on the river wall outside for a moment and look west: the masts of the Cutty Sark, the two domes, the long bend of the Thames towards the City. Then turn your back on the water, walk south along Park Row, cross Romney Road, and look for a perfectly white house standing alone on the lawns... the first truly classical building in England.