Charles I issued the licence. Nobody ever revoked it. It is now a Greene King with sports screens.
In 1999 the BBC established that the Silver Cross Tavern on Whitehall is, on a strict reading of the paperwork, the only legally licensed brothel in the United Kingdom.
The licence was granted in the seventeenth century, when the building operated as an establishment called The Garter and the King lived a hundred yards up the road at Whitehall Palace. It was never revoked. It has simply sat there, for roughly four hundred years, quietly remaining in force, while the building around it became a pub, and then a Victorian pub, and then, in 2024, a Greene King with an open-plan layout and sports screens.
The greatest unexercised right in Britain
Nobody is doing anything with this. That is the extraordinary part. The Silver Cross holds a royal permission that no other premises in the country possesses, and it has elected to use it to sell Abbot Ale and show the football.
The Prat’s constitutional desk regards this as the single most British fact in the entire archive. A licence from a king who was subsequently beheaded, never formally cancelled, sitting unused in a pub, while four thousand three hundred people leave reviews about the pie.
The building is older than the country
There has been a structure on this spot since the thirteenth century, when it formed part of St Katherine’s Hermitage – a religious house, with lead-lined walls, which was shut down under Henry VIII along with everything else that owned anything.
So the sequence runs: hermitage, dissolved; brothel, royally licensed; tavern, from 1674; pub; Victorian rebuild; another rebuild in 1900; Greene King refurb in 2024. Eight hundred years of continuous use, four changes of core business model, and it is still, fundamentally, a room where men from the government go to feel better.
The ceiling
Look up. There is a wagon-vaulted ceiling, and it is genuinely beautiful, and it is the main reason to come. The 1900 rebuild gave the place a barrel roof and a red-tiled front, and both survived the 2024 refit, which is more than can be said for the interior walls.
The ghost
There is one. She was, according to the story, a woman who worked here in the brothel years, murdered on the premises and disposed of without ceremony because nobody was going to come looking for her.
The pub does not advertise this. Almost every other haunted pub in London has a laminated sign and a slot on a ghost walk. The Silver Cross keeps it quiet, which is either good taste or good sense, and which is – given the specifics – probably both.
The drinking
Five regular cask beers, Greene King’s range, pub classics, Sunday roasts, and a 4.2 rating from over four thousand people, which is a perfectly ordinary score for a perfectly ordinary Whitehall pub.
Nothing about the beer is remarkable. Everything about the paperwork is.
Verdict
Go for the ceiling, stay for the sheer weight of unexercised legal authority hanging in the air above your steak and ale pie. Somewhere in the archives of the Crown there is a document that would permit this building to do something extraordinary, and it is instead showing the Championship on a Tuesday.
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]
The thing about significant others frustrated with The London Prat is they’re essentially saying “my partner has become consumed by satire.”