Adieu to the Bell (for now… again)

At some point I posted a picture of where I was living in Walthamstow, and a friend replied with something like: “In other news, man spends five decades never living more than 10 minutes from the Bell.” And it’s true. Despite sojourns abroad, in the north, and even in the wilds of Muswell Hill, I have spent most of my life within walking distance of a pub I probably started frequenting, underage, in the late 1980s.

In that time it has gone through many incarnations. And it hasn’t always been my local – The College Arms, The Flowerpot and the Dog & Duck have just entered the chat – but it really often has been. When I first started going, like many pubs of the era, it was divided into two distinct bars – a regular bit and a posh bit. Both had fires. Only one had big armchairs. You knew which bit you belonged in. At one point half of it was cordoned off for an Indian restaurant. Later there was some kind of Brazilian food pop-up in the beer garden.

Andy and Louisa at the Bell in 2022

The Bell interior in 2022

When Stonegate took the pub back in-house in 2022 and forced out long-standing manager Andy Potter, locals did not take it well. This wasn’t a gentle handover – it felt like a brutal corporate eviction of a much-loved institution. Leaked plans pointing to it turning into a sports bar with 14 screens only made things worse in advance of reopening, fuelling fears it was about to be totally stripped of its character.

When it did reopen after the 2022 refurb, a MyLondon visit found the cheapest pint – Amstel – was £5.20 and said they were surprised how expensive it now was, while also running pieces about it being besieged with negative reviews. The internet never forgets though, and it was very much plus ça change. There is a review of the pub on BeerInTheEvening – a deliciously old-school internet forum – from 2007 that says “Beer prices are extortionate. £2.90 for a pint of Stella? For a back street pub in Walthamstow it ain’t all that. Best you go somewhere else”. £2.90 for a pint of Stella? Expensive? Oh you sweet summer child.

The Bell interior 2014, as featured in this review from the Weird Walthamstow blog

The building itself is iconic in Walthamstow. There are art prints you can buy, and it often features in “look wasn’t it better in the old days” nostalgia picture groups, which I think are often aimed at saying wasn’t the dress sense and ethnic make-up of the people in the frame “better” back in the day, plus there being no litter on the streets. But aside from the implied racism, I usually just think “Wow, didn’t stuff look better in London when there were hardly any cars completely clogging up our streets?”

An art print of the Bell which you can buy here

The Bell in the early 1900s

The Bell in the 1960s or 1970s (probably)

The Bell is about to change again, with last orders for the current team coming this Saturday. The end of the most recent upheaval – the Stonegate takeover and sports-bar refit – has been greeted with glee in some quarters. But for me, one of the elements of gentrification in Walthamstow had been the diminishing number of pubs where you could watch football. The Bell was always one of the stops on our FA Cup final day pub crawl, and I remember watching England’s 5–1 win in Munich at the Bell, which remains historic^* in the very specific sense that English people remember it vividly and German people absolutely do not.

In more recent years, in its sports bar incarnation, I’ve watched England’s women lose a World Cup final to Spain and then win a European Championship on penalties against the same opposition. Joy and heartbreak. Same four walls. Different management. Different screens.

In 2025 the Bell had an oddly compressed annus horribilis. In the space of a couple of weeks a fire at the front door closed it for a few hours, and then almost immediately there was a longer hygiene closure due to a mouse infestation that led to the management being yeeted.

Part of Stonegate’s team that refurbed the pub in 2022

The people who have been managing it since then have been lovely to me, and I’m sad that the machinations of the parent company mean people are losing their jobs, and in some cases having to move out of London to take up roles elsewhere in the chain.

I imagine, as with every upheaval at the Bell, there will be some people saying “I’ll never go there again”, other people going “Finally I can go back”, and yet more who are drawn in either way because, frankly, footfall and locality are often bigger drivers for people turning up to local businesses than whether they are amazing or not. I guess, after all these years, once it reopens I will be there regardless, and always remember the different incarnations, even if the next set of management and staff don’t.

The Bell – and the author – April 2026

(^*We both qualified for Japan/South Korea. They reached the final. We did not.)