Picture of Bridge House, SE1 2UP

Historical version 26 of Bridge House, SE1 2UP (view current version)

  • 020 7407 5818
  • 218 Tower Bridge Road, SE1 2UP (streetmap) (osm) (gmap) (bingmap) (streetview)
  • 11:30am-11pm Sun-Wed; 11:30am-midnight Thu-Sat

Good Beer Guide pub near Tower Bridge. The interior is all pine tables and cream covered chairs; there are also a couple of sofas and a fireplace.

They offer a full range of very well kept Adnams beers, including the new "carbon neutral" one, East Green, all priced at around £3 as of late 2008. They also have Aspall cider. In December 2008, a pint of Licher Weizer was £4.40.

Although this is definitely a pub, where you go up to the bar to order drinks and you can come in for a drink without dining, there was a little weirdness on one lunchtime visit when the staff seemed to assume we were in for lunch, and asked us a number of questions when we arrived instead of just letting us sit down and send someone to the bar. If this happens to you, don't be put off! Just tell them you're in for drinks and they'll leave you in peace.

Food is served 11:30am-4pm and 5pm-10:30pm Monday to Saturday, and 11:30am-4pm and 5pm-10pm Sunday (as of April 2008). Various combinations of Kake, bob, Martin, DrHyde, Nick, etc have eaten here several times now. The food is of the gastropub variety, and is very good. They also stock various bar snacks including wasabi crackers.

In October 2007 we tried the homemade hummous (very garlicky - a good thing!), the grilled kidneys with black pudding and bacon, the fillet steak (about £16; cooked properly, with a very good peppercorn sauce on the side, though there may have been a bit too much connective tissue for bob's liking), and the bread and butter pudding (very good in bob's opinion, and the custard was top notch). In October 2008, Kake's ribeye steak (£15.75) was again good; cooked as requested (rare), a very generous size, and accompanied by some tasty "fat chips". The price of the steak had risen to £16 photo by the time of secretlondon's visit in December 2008, with peppercorn sauce being an extra £2.

There's a small room in the basement which can be booked - it's a little bit cramped in there, and basically set up for dining more than drinking. They will do table service down there for both food and drinks though. They also have a larger function room upstairs which will hold around 80 people and is free to book if you have more than about 25 in your party; they'll staff the bar up there for you too.

We've never seen it be unpleasantly crowded here. On a Saturday evening visit in September 2008 it was busy but not rammed; Kake and bob managed to get a sofa. They seem to do a lot of their trade at lunchtimes.

Accessibility: Toilets are in the basement, down a flight of stairs from the main room. There's also at least one step between the basement function room and the toilets. There's another toilet accessed from the upstairs function room, but it's only for the use of function room patrons.

See also:

Last visited by secretlondon, 4 December 2008. Opening hours taken from Time Out website, April 2008.
OS X co-ord: 533595 OS Y co-ord: 180025 (Latitude: 51.502866 Longitude: -0.074967)
This is version 26 (as of 2009-09-10 21:19:33). View current version. List all versions.