The Black Friar, Queen Victoria Street

Published 9 November 2026 · By the Guide to London editorial team · Editor: Terje Moy

The Black Friar is a working pub at 174 Queen Victoria Street, facing the north entrance of Blackfriars station, with the strangest interior of any pub in London: a room of marble, mosaic and bronze in which jolly friars fish, sing, garden and doze. It is free to walk in, open seven days a week, and listed Grade II* for what is inside as much as for the front.

The building is a narrow wedge of about 1875 standing alone on a corner. Its interior is younger: it was remodelled from around 1905, and again in 1917, in the Arts and Crafts manner, a style that prized handwork, rich materials and a sense of humour. The friars are a joke about the site, which was once the precinct of the Dominican friars whose black habits gave Blackfriars its name.

Our field guide to Victorian pub interiors places the Black Friar in the story of London pub design, and our overview of London's historic pubs sets it beside the older taverns. This page is a walk round the building itself: what to look at, in which order, and when you can see it without a crowd.

The site: a priory, a royal court and a playhouse

The Dominican order, known in England as the Black Friars, moved to a large walled precinct here in the 1270s, between Ludgate Hill and the Thames. It became one of the grandest religious houses in medieval London. Parliaments and royal councils met in its halls, and in 1529 the court that heard Henry VIII's case for annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon sat at Blackfriars.

Henry dissolved the priory in 1538 and its buildings were sold off. Part of them later housed the indoor Blackfriars playhouse used by Shakespeare's company, the model for the candlelit theatre described on our page about Shakespeare's Globe. Almost nothing of the priory is visible today. The one place where a fragment survives inside a later building is Apothecaries' Hall in Black Friars Lane, two minutes north, which our guide to the livery halls describes.

The pub has no medieval fabric at all. What it has is a memory of the friars, invented around 1905 when a new landlord, William Petit, hired the architect H. Fuller Clark to make the place memorable. CAMRA's description calls the result an early example of theming, and that is fair: it is a themed pub, made by first-rate craftsmen.

Outside: read the front before you go in

Stand on the pavement by the station and look at the whole wedge first. The ground floor wraps round the building, with arched doors on both streets and on the blunt corner. Above them runs a deep mosaic band. The list entry records its lettering as "Saloon", "174", "The Black Friar", "174" and "Brandies", a reminder that the pub once advertised its different rooms and drinks on the outside.

Between the doors are carved panels of drinking and devilry, and bronze panels advertising drinks, with friars pointing the way in; CAMRA notes that one "Saloon Bar" sign helpfully tells you the saloon is nine yards away. Over the Queen Victoria Street door is a mosaic of a friar with carafes of wine, and above each entrance hangs a wrought-iron sign with a lamp. Above the corner door, which is no longer used, are a mosaic "174", a large stone friar and a clock with a mosaic face. That stone friar is the picture everyone takes.

The building stands alone because everything around it has gone. Railway and road works cleared the streets on either side, and what is left is the triangular plan of a corner pub with nothing to lean on.

The main bar: carols, eels and the fireplace

Inside, the walls are clad in marble of several colours, with reliefs in bronze, copper, wood and mosaic. The sculpture is by Henry Poole and Frederick Callcott. Take the room in this order, and you will see nearly everything the list entry describes.

1. The fireplace recess. A broad three-part arch frames a corner seat on either side of the grate. The firedogs are topped with small imps. Above the mantel, a bronze relief called "Carols" shows friars singing, flanked by two friars' heads.
2. Above the bar. A bronze relief titled "Tomorrow will be Friday" shows the friars catching trout and eels, because Friday was a meatless day.
3. Over the way into the back room. "Saturday afternoon" shows friars gardening, with their vegetables picked out in coloured enamel.
4. The window. A stained-glass panel shows a friar in a sunlit garden.

None of these is behind glass or rope. They are at head height in a room where people are drinking, so be patient: wait for the people under a panel to move rather than leaning across their table.

The Grotto and its mottoes

The back room is the reason people travel to the Black Friar. It is small and windowless, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling of mosaic and marble ribs, and it was dug out of a railway vault. Clark designed it in 1913, but the war delayed the work and it was carried out between 1917 and 1921. You enter through three arches with friars carved on the pillars.

Each end wall has a bronze relief with a proverb for a title. "Don't advertise, tell a gossip" shows the friars doing the weekly wash. "A good thing is soon snatched up" shows them pushing a trussed pig in a wheelbarrow. Below them, small devils stand for music, drama, painting and literature. Under a "window" that is really an arrangement of mirrors between red marble columns, a sleeping friar surrounded by fairies is titled "Contentment surpasses riches", worked in mother-of-pearl and semi-precious stone.

Look up at the side walls for the mottoes, in gilt lettering made by the Birmingham Guild. CAMRA's description lists them: "Industry is all", with a friar asleep beneath it, "Haste is slow", "Finery is foolery", "Silence is golden", "Wisdom is rare" and "Seize occasion", which shows a friar drinking. Six alabaster capitals illustrate nursery rhymes and sixteen smaller ones show Aesop's fables. Four lamp brackets carry alabaster figures of Morning, Noon, Evening and Night holding up a bronze friar with water buckets.

The jokes are the point. Every motto is a piece of solemn advice, and every friar under it is ignoring it.

Saved in the 1960s, protected since 1972

The Black Friar was due to be demolished in the 1960s, when the area around the bridge was being rebuilt. It survived after a public campaign usually credited to the poet John Betjeman, who later became Poet Laureate and spent much of his life campaigning for Victorian buildings. We have not found a primary record of the campaign itself, so treat the details as the accepted story rather than a documented one.

What is documented is the protection. The building was listed at Grade II* on 5 June 1972, which means the interior cannot be altered without listed building consent. CAMRA gives it three stars in its National Inventory of historic pub interiors, its highest grade, and its listing records the pub as an Asset of Community Value, a status under which a community group gets time to put together a bid if the pub is offered for sale. The freehold belongs to Mitchells & Butlers, which runs it as one of its Nicholson's pubs.

When to come, and when not to

This is a City pub, and the City works office hours. On weekdays the rooms fill when the offices empty: from about 17:00 the main bar and the pavement outside are packed, and it stays that way until well into the evening. That is our observation, not a published figure, but it is the pattern of every pub round here.

The best times to see the decoration are a weekday between about 15:00 and 16:30, or a weekend afternoon, when the City is half empty. Lunchtime on a weekday is busy with food orders but easier than the evening. If you are combining it with sightseeing, a morning at St Paul's Cathedral, five minutes up the hill, followed by a late lunch here works well.

Food is served most of the day: 11:30 to 21:00 Monday to Saturday and 12:00 to 20:00 on Sunday, according to the CAMRA listing in November 2026. It is ordinary pub food. Come for the room; if you want a proper meal nearby, our page on where to eat near St Paul's has the alternatives.

Getting there, and step-free access

Blackfriars station has two entrances, one on each side of the river. Use the north one, on Queen Victoria Street; the pub is across the road junction as you come out. Our guide to Blackfriars station and the bridge explains the two entrances and the river views from the platforms.

The station has lifts, but lifts are not the same as a step-free route, so check the current status on TfL's website before you travel. Inside the pub, the main bar is on the ground floor; the corner door is no longer used, so you go in from Queen Victoria Street or New Bridge Street. We could not confirm the level of every doorway or the toilets, so if you use a wheelchair, ask the staff. Our page on step-free travel in London covers the network.

Fitting it into a walk

The Black Friar is the natural start of a pub walk west along Fleet Street. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, rebuilt after the Great Fire, is about ten minutes away down an alley on the north side of the street, and the churches along the way are covered on our page about St Bride's and Fleet Street. Our historic pub walks give the full route to Chancery Lane.

For the opposite kind of interior, a late-Victorian pub designed to keep its customers apart, take the Central line from St Paul's to Holborn and see the Princess Louise. The two together show how fast pub design changed in twenty years. The ordinary manners of ordering at the bar are explained in our guide to pub etiquette.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Black Friar pub free to visit?

Yes. It is a working pub, not a museum, so there is no admission charge and you can walk in during opening hours. If you stay to look at the decoration for more than a few minutes, the polite thing is to buy a drink, which can be a soft drink.

Why is it called the Black Friar?

The pub stands on part of the site of the medieval Dominican priory. The Dominicans were known as the Black Friars from the colour of their habits, and the whole district took its name from them. The friars in the decoration are an Edwardian joke about that history, not portraits of real monks.

Is the Black Friar Victorian?

The building is from about 1875, so in the Victorian period, but the famous interior is Edwardian and later: it was remodelled from around 1905 and in 1917 by H. Fuller Clark, and the back room was finished between 1917 and 1921. It is usually described as Arts and Crafts, and sometimes as Art Nouveau.

When is the Black Friar quietest?

In our experience, a weekday afternoon between lunch and the end of the office day, or a weekend afternoon, when the City is quiet. Weekday evenings from about 17:00 are the busiest time, and the Grotto may be full.

Sources

• Historic England - The Black Friar Public House, 174 Queen Victoria Street, list entry 1285723, Grade II* (checked November 2026)
• CAMRA - Black Friar, London: National Inventory description and opening times (checked November 2026)
• Food Standards Agency - food hygiene rating for The Blackfriar, 174 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4EG (checked November 2026)
• legislation.gov.uk - Localism Act 2011, Part 5, Chapter 3 (assets of community value) (checked November 2026)
• Transport for London - Blackfriars Underground Station (checked November 2026)