The Churchill Arms

The Churchill Arms has stood on Kensington Church Street since 1750, though its current fame rests less on the building’s age than on the thousands of flowers Fuller’s growers cover its exterior with each year, making it one of the most photographed pub fronts in the whole of London during spring and summer.

Inside, Churchill memorabilia lines the walls, a nod to the pub’s connection to the former prime minister’s grandparents who were regulars in the eighteenth century building, while behind the traditional bar sits a Thai kitchen that has been serving curries and stir fries since the early 1990s, run through a glass conservatory extension built onto the back of the pub.

Pad Thai and the house curries draw as many visitors as the flowers do on the outside, and the combination, a proper English pub with cask ales serving genuinely good Thai food in a conservatory out back, is unusual enough to have become the pub’s actual identity rather than a passing novelty act.

The conservatory does not take bookings, and tables are cramped and often shared with strangers at busy times, so anyone visiting on a weekend evening should expect to wait, sometimes a long one, given how well known the pub now is with visitors as well as long standing Kensington locals.

It remains one of the few places in London where the tourist attraction outside and the actual pub experience inside genuinely overlap without either one feeling like a compromise on the other.

Fuller’s, which owns the pub, has kept the Thai kitchen running as a semi independent operation for over three decades now, and the arrangement has clearly outlasted plenty of shorter lived pub food concepts elsewhere in London precisely because it was never treated as a passing trend. The flowers themselves require constant upkeep through the warmer months, and the pub closes the floral display down over winter, so anyone visiting specifically for the famous exterior should check the season before making a special trip to Kensington Church Street. The pub sits close to both Notting Hill Gate and Kensington High Street stations, making it an easy stop to combine with a walk through Holland Park or an afternoon spent around the museums further south in South Kensington.