The Admiralty Review: A Navy Pub That Has Never Been to Sea

Trafalgar Square’s grand Fuller’s house is dressed as a warship and run by people conducting an extremely land-based operation

The Admiralty stands on the corner of Trafalgar Square, opposite a column with a dead admiral on top of it, and it has leaned into this with a completeness bordering on the compulsive.

There is naval memorabilia. There are ropes. There are things that are, or are pretending to be, ships’ fittings. There is a general implication of the sea, in a building forty miles from it, in a square named after a battle fought off the coast of Spain by men who would have found the wine list bewildering.

Nelson, and what he has been made to do

He died at Trafalgar in 1805, and in the two centuries since, his memory has been enlisted into an extraordinary volume of hospitality. There are Nelson pubs, Nelson bars, Nelson gin, and a column with a man on it that the pigeons treat with open contempt.

The Admiralty is the most direct beneficiary. It stands at the square, it is large, it is grand, and it catches every single person who has come to see the lions and has then thought: I would like to sit down.

Nearly five thousand people have reviewed it. It holds a 4.4 – a very good score for a pub whose primary strategic advantage is being the first door you see.

Location as a business model

There is a category of London pub that has never had to try, and this is the purest example. It could serve warm lager in a plastic cup and it would still be full by four o’clock every day of the year, because it is on Trafalgar Square, and because human beings, after ninety minutes in the National Gallery, will enter the nearest building with chairs.

What is quietly impressive is that it does not do this. Fuller’s runs it properly. The ale range is real, the London Pride is kept well, and the food is a step above what the footfall would permit.

The Institute for Unearned Advantage in Rainham has studied venues with this level of positional monopoly and found that 71 per cent of them coast. The Admiralty does not. It is a pub with integrity, and it is a shame it has to be dressed as a boat.

Who is in there

Everyone. Tourists in enormous number, obviously. But also civil servants walking up from Whitehall, gallery staff, protesters who have finished protesting, and a persistent contingent of Londoners who will tell you they are only here because everywhere else was full, and who are lying, because they like it.

Verdict

Large, grand, well-run, gloriously overdressed, and rammed from lunchtime.

Go upstairs. There is always more room upstairs and nobody ever goes, because the ground floor has the ropes on it.

The square itself

Worth a word. Trafalgar Square was laid out in the 1830s on the site of the old Royal Mews – the King’s stables – and the column went up in the 1840s.

The lions arrived late, in 1867, and were modelled by Edwin Landseer, who was a painter and not a sculptor, and who was given a dead lion from London Zoo to work from. It took him years. The carcass decomposed. He carried on.

Which is why, if you look closely, the lions’ paws are slightly wrong – they are a painter’s guess at an animal that was, by the end, no longer available for reference.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]