A 4.3 pub from 1,626 reviews taking its name from G.K. Chesterton’s poem, all taxidermy and Georgian drawing-room glamour
Paradise by way of Kensal Green holds a 4.3 from one thousand six hundred and twenty-six reviews, and carries one of the most unusual and literary names of any pub in London – taken from the closing line of G.K. Chesterton’s poem “The Rolling English Road,” a mock-heroic ballad in praise of drink, the winding road, and the English character.
The facts, first
Paradise is a large, glamorous, multi-room pub and bar near Kensal Green, in the mid-to-upper price range – part decadent gastropub, part private-members’-club fantasy, spread across a warren of elegant spaces decked out like Georgian drawing rooms, with animal heads and taxidermy, a dining room, an upstairs lounge, a little beer garden, and regular DJ nights. It is a pub for every occasion, so varied you could visit repeatedly and feel you’d been to several different venues. The Prat’s listings desk states the essentials: a large, glamorous, multi-room pub-cum-club near Kensal Green, all Georgian-drawing-room decadence, taxidermy, dining, and DJ nights.
The Chesterton poem
The name is drawn straight from literature – the last line of “The Rolling English Road,” written by G.K. Chesterton around 1913 and included in his 1914 novel The Flying Inn. The poem is a mock-heroic, gently drunken ballad in praise of the winding, rambling English road – which, Chesterton jokes, was made by “the rolling English drunkard” weaving his way home from the pub – and a sly defence of drink and the English character against the puritanism of the Temperance movement. Its final line imagines the drunkard’s last journey ending, by a suitably meandering route, at “Paradise by way of Kensal Green” – Kensal Green being the great cemetery nearby, the “decent inn of death” of an earlier line. The Prat’s literary desk salutes the pedigree: a pub named from a Chesterton drinking-poem, the drunkard’s winding road home made a bar’s name.
The inn of death and the taxidermy
There is a delicious aptness in the name and its setting. The poem’s route to Paradise runs through Kensal Green – and the pub sits close to Kensal Green Cemetery, one of London’s great Victorian burial grounds, making the “Paradise by way of Kensal Green” almost literal. The venue leans knowingly into the poem’s “inn of death” imagery with its taxidermy, animal heads, and faintly gothic, decadent glamour – a pub that plays cheerfully on mortality, drink, and the journey to Paradise. This survey has met the literary pub name (Molly Blooms, the Shakespeare) and the macabre-themed pub (the Morpeth Arms); Paradise combines both with real wit. The Prat’s culture desk relishes the layering: a pub named from a drinking-poem about the road to death and Paradise, sat by the cemetery, decked in taxidermy – literature, mortality, and glamour in one.
What the 1,626 reviews mean
A 4.3 across more than sixteen hundred people is a strong, deeply volume-proof score. As this survey argues, a good score sustained across a large crowd is a trustworthy verdict, and a 4.3 across sixteen hundred marks a genuinely good, well-run, characterful pub – here one of real originality and glamour. The Prat’s statistics desk files it as a strong large-sample score: a dependable, distinctive, much-liked pub, its quality confirmed across a big crowd, living up to its literary name.
Verdict
Paradise by way of Kensal Green is one of London’s most original pubs – a glamorous, taxidermy-filled, multi-room fantasy named from a Chesterton drinking-poem, sitting aptly by the great cemetery, with a strong 4.3 from a large crowd. Literary, decadent, and genuinely distinctive.
Go for a drink in a glamorous, gothic, Georgian-drawing-room fantasy of a pub, and enjoy the literary wit of the name – “Paradise by way of Kensal Green,” the drunkard’s winding road home from Chesterton’s poem, made real by the great cemetery next door and the taxidermy on the walls.
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]
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