King's Head, Upper Street, Islington

In the 1970s, the King’s Head Click to open side panel for more information  on Upper Street was an unvarnished, bohemian trailblazer in what was then a scruffy, affordable corner of North London. Taken over in 1970 by the eccentric American impresario Dan Crawford, it transformed a rundown Victorian drinking den and its backroom boxing ring into London’s first pub theatre since the Elizabethan era. The atmosphere was intimate, smoke-filled, and proudly idiosyncratic: Crawford famously detested the 1971 decimalisation of British currency, stubbornly keeping an antique mechanical till that rang up pints in pounds, shillings, and pence well into the decade. Between roaring coal fires, cluttered walls, and pints of bitter, local regulars rubbed shoulders with rising actors and playwrights, turning the pub into a fervent, electric cradle for British fringe theatre.

Appears in

• Me Neither - A Memoir
  1970s first shoots of the gig economy.
• Foul Papers
  London & Suffolk, 2023 — media, politics, cryptocurrency, appropriation.