Eight minutes from Parliament, a pub that isn’t quite a pub.
(Blue Boar Pub, Conrad London St James)
Although the Blue Boar Pub has its own entrance on Tothill Street, I have arranged to meet my fellow diners in the lobby of the Conrad London St James, which it forms part of.
It’s a small lobby with a gleaming marble floor and at its centre a life-sized, bronze statue of a man climbing a ladder with a heavy hod biting into his shoulder. Well-heeled hotel guests pass through the lobby, heels clicking, trainers squeaking. Several are middle-aged men wearing baseball caps and overcoats as if channelling their inner Logan Roy. Another wears a Versace denim jacket. I know it’s Versace as it has the brand snow-washed into it a hundred times at a myriad of angles. I start to get a migraine staring at it.
A doorman in a bowler hat and black cape that parts to reveal red sleeves opens and closes doors for guests. The multinational front desk staff tap at keyboards and whisper to each other in low tones and several languages. This really doesn’t feel like the sort of hotel that would house a London pub.
My fellow diners arrive and we go through to the Blue Boar via the hotel. We’re passed by a waiter carrying a tray with two steaks crowned with a mound of herby butter – it smells divinely of caramelised meat. I don’t need to see the menu. I want that.
The Blue Boar is a plushly upholstered and stylish take on the British Pub, in the way you might say Wembley is a plushly upholstered and stylish take on the British Football Stadium – it’s like the real thing but more expensive and lacking a certain frisson that might not suit the target audience. The layout is pleasing (artfully) asymmetric, with nooks and crannies and widely spaced tables offering a degree of privacy and an absence of solitary, wild-haired drinkers talking to themselves as they nurse a pint – in my experience, a standard feature of many Westminster pubs.
It ticks off other classic tropes of the British Pub: dog friendly, tick; Sunday roast, tick; a wide range of ales, tick; Bottomless Beef Wellington Brunch? It also boasts a rare and diminishing honour as one of the few remaining pubs hosting a House of Commons division bell. The pub says the privilege was granted by the Commons’ Serjeant at Arms. Either way, MPs drinking or dining at the Blue Boar will hear the bell sound and know they have eight minutes to rush back to Parliament to vote. There are only a handful of other pubs in the Westminster area that still have one, including The Red Lion, The Westminster Arms, St Stephen’s Tavern and the Marquis of Granby. There were once 400. Disappointingly, MPs now also receive app notifications and so the tradition may be under threat.
I look at the reversed golden letters spelling out ‘British Pub Dining’ on the window to my right and imagine generations of drinkers passing the window on their way to buy a pint. Though that doesn’t take me back far as this incarnation of the Blue Boar Pub opened in 2021.
I allow my imagination to take me back to the original Blue Boar’s Head Tavern, a timber-framed building dating back to at least the 14th century and located at the end of King Street. Many Blue Boar pubs were renamed from White Boar, after the defeat of Richard III at Bosworth and the accession of the Tudor dynasty. But records indicate Blue Boar was attached to the tavern prior to that. Fittingly, the Blue Boar was the badge of the de Vere family, the Earls of Oxford, and John de Vere commanded Henry Tudor’s vanguard at Bosworth.
During the following century and a half, the pub and the street around it picked up a reputation as a haunt of political agitators, most famously Old Ironsides, the future Lord Protector and regicide, Oliver Cromwell. The tavern was rebuilt in 1750 and finally demolished in 1899 during the extensive Victorian redevelopment of the area.
The bell doesn’t ring during my lunch, nor do I see any MPs or agitators dining. However, I do see Michael Gove (now Baron Gove, who sits in the House of Lords) walk past the window with his distinctive upright stance, feet splayed, looking like he might tip backwards at any moment. Ten minutes later he walks past in the opposite direction carrying a Pret A Manger bag. A decade ago Pret told a parliamentary committee that one in fifty of its applicants was British. A decade on, free movement has gone and the shortage Pret warned about is simply how UK hospitality works now.
I order the sirloin steak, and it is cooked to delicious perfection, pink with no blood and the fat rendered so well it melts in the mouth. My companions dine on voluptuously plump fish cakes and beautifully pink lamb chops of a size that makes me wonder if the lamb works out. The service is attentive, friendly and prompt. The beer excellently kept the glass cool in my hand as I raise it to sip. It is a wonderfully satisfying lunch, and the menu still carries the imprint of Sally Abé, who set it up in 2021 and has since moved on.
I wonder, as we make our way out, whether it really matters that the Blue Boar Pub is a high-end restaurant, affecting the gentler mannerisms of a pub. With pubs closing at a rate of almost two a day across Britain in the first three months of 2026, up more than a quarter on the same period last year, according to the British Beer & Pub Association, we need to hang onto every pub we can.
I slow at the door, dawdling past Gerald Scarfe caricatures and the figurines in their glass cases, giving it every chance. The bell doesn’t ring. Outside on Tothill Street the golden letters read the right way round at last: ‘British Pub Dining’.
Postscript…
Fact: Shakespeare’s Local by Pete Brown. Six centuries of English history told through one London pub, the George in Southwark. Brown makes the case, entirely convincingly in my opinion, that the pub is the most accurate historical document Britain possesses.
Fiction: House of Cards by Michael Dobbs. Westminster scheming at its most enjoyable, written by a man who worked inside the machine. Read it and you’ll understand why some establishments still keep a division bell within earshot of the wine list.
