On a Friday night in early December, Deptford’s Dog and Bell is Christmas as imagined by a Haribo-addled toddler.

A huge resin Santa, grinning merrily in his sleigh, squats in Prince Street outside the pub. A few yards away, an 18-foot fir tree rises from a massive pot that’s been done up like a Christmas present. ‘Merry Christmas’ is spelled out in great glowing letters on the wall opposite. There are thousands of lights strung across the street, cascading down the side of the tree, arranged artfully around windows, and, most impressively, tacked by the thousand to the pub’s interior walls, lighting drinkers up like a Hollywood film set.

This latter flourish is awe-inspiring—and quite flattering, too, even for a group of aging dads sitting towards the back of the pub (of which I am one.) Most of the many other customers, though, are too youthful to need help. They’re part of a generation that doesn’t like pubs or drinking, or so we’re told—but there are enough of them here to bring that particular assumption into question.

The Dog and Bell is perhaps of limited use as evidence in terms of wider trends. It exists in a world of its own, sui generis, a glowing realm on a dark South London street. This backstreet boozer in a historically unglamorous part of town has not only survived the pub cull of the past few decades, it has thrived. Indeed, few London pubs are currently more fashionable.

How? Well, for all the Dog and Bell’s singularity, its story tracks the evolution of pubs in modern London from the 1970s, when they were ubiquitous, to now, our frantic, distracting era of Instagram Guinness and event culture, when a simple pint in the pub is no longer good enough reason to get off the sofa. It’s been a long journey, but at every key junction over the past 50 years this charismatic pub has taken the right turn.

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There are two Deptford High Streets. The first, the bustling modern thoroughfare, exists at street level; for the second, you have to look up. At the top of the street’s buildings, amidst pigeon roosts and stray patches of greenery, is evidence of what once was—not so much ghost signs, but stubborn vestigia of pubs’ former existence. The Red Lion and Wheatsheaf at no 45; The Deptford Arms, No 52; The Prince Regent, No 80; The Mechanic’s Arms, No 126; The Brown Bear, No 154; The Windsor Castle, No 161, which hosted the current King for an impromptu glass of cider in 1986; and the White Swan at No 217, recently converted without planning permission. (Now, respectively: a Caribbean restaurant; a Paddy Power; a Euro-Afro fusion restaurant; a former bank, now empty; a deli; an after-school club; a Vietnamese restaurant.)

There are many others nearby. Even on Prince Street, less than 100 metres in length, there’s a former pub, The Navy Arms, which shut at least 20 years’ ago. Once it competed with the Dog and Bell in tug-of-war contests; now just a few reminders of its former vibrancy exist, including a painted-over sign reading ‘Saloon Bar’ on a door—’Flat 6 Navy Arms’ reads a more modern note just above.

Deptford has been transformed since the 1960s. There are a variety of reasons for this, notably the loss of working class jobs and an ever-evolving demographic, but the result is straightforward for pubs. They’re mostly long gone.

A 2007 BBC documentary about Lewisham’s Council’s sale of a tower block on the nearby Pepys Estate, The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities, featured Doug and Brenda Elsley, owners of the John Evelyn pub, five minutes from the Dog and Bell. Opened in 1969 to serve the new estate, by 2007 its few remaining customers were old and the Elsleys saddled with debt. “If I was to dig up everyone that's died in the last 17 years, most probably this pub wouldn’t be big enough [to fit them all in],” Doug said. Soon after the film was broadcast, the John Evelyn became a bookmakers.

In this context, The Dog and Bell’s survival seems miraculous—but perhaps ‘miracle’ just means an unlikely combination of nous and luck. It’s a remarkable survivor, no doubt, but like Deptford itself it has had to evolve with the times.

That began in the late 1970s, when the pub passed from Charrington Brewery’s control into that of Fuller’s. The West London brewery’s first move was to change the name: called The Royal Marine since the 1860s, when the Marines were based nearby for a short period, it reverted to its original name under Fuller’s.

Then, in the early 1980s, Fuller’s sold the pub to Kevin and Bridget Coyle, who also ran Brockley’s Wickham Arms. This was a crucial moment, according to John Williams, who has been drinking at the Dog and Bell since 1981. “That’s why it survived,” he says. “It became a freehouse in the ’80s. Simple as that.”

Rodger Molyneux, now of Carshalton’s Hope and Wimbledon’s Trafalgar, worked behind the bar when the Coyles ran the pub. “Before Kevin took it on, the pub—which is very tucked away—was full of villains,” he says. “The first day we took over the Dog, we took about 30 weird and wonderful blokes from the Blackheath Morris—who were based at the Wickham Arms—down with us. We made sure there were a lot of us in there every night. The villains wandered off, unsurprisingly.”

““If I was to dig up everyone that’s died in the last 17 years, most probably this pub wouldn’t be big enough to fit them all in.””

— Doug Elsley, the John Evelyn

As the clientele changed, the physical nature of the pub began to evolve, too. A visitor today will find the main bar directly in front of them as they enter, with further rooms to the left, right and a smaller space at the back leading to a yard. In the early 1980s, though, only the central section—where the bar is now—existed, John says. “Well, not even that,” he says, pointing at the spot on the bar where it once ended.

There was a “tiny snug”, too, according to Chris Jones—who drank regularly in the pub between his student days in the late ‘70s and 2018, when he left the UK—and outdoor space of a kind: “a small area of dust and rubble where one could sit and look at the stars,” as he puts it.

The pub has expanded gradually ever since. Most recently, the room on the left was carved out of a former flat in 2022 and tables outside installed (and never removed) at the time of Covid-19. What hasn’t changed is its ability to lure drinkers from further afield. “I remember being in here having a lunchtime drink, and Jools Holland was practising on the pub piano,” John says. “My own private concert! He was a regular back then.”

And then there’s cask ale, which once exerted the same London-wide gravitational pull as Guinness does now. Des de Moor, who lived on the Pepys Estate in the 1980s and still lives nearby, remembers how the pub built a reputation. “It was a cult pub even then,” says Des, one of the UK’s foremost beer writers. “There was a little group of my mates that used to go to the Dog and Bell—but it was more than just the fact that it had real ale. It had an atmosphere; it’s always been a place where most of the customers make an effort to get there.”

That atmosphere was nurtured by Charlie and Eileen Gallagher, who ran the pub from 1988 until 2016. The couple were a neat final piece in the jigsaw of the pub’s continued allure: they took an atmospheric back-street London pub, a place where drinkers congregated over cask ale, and imbued it with the best traditions of Irish hospitality.

Since then it has combined the best of both worlds (“There's nothing better than the taste and flavour of real English ale,” Charlie told a local paper in 2004 after one of the pub’s regular CAMRA award wins.) There’s stout—Guinness and Murphy’s, and Beamish for St Patrick’s Day in 2024, too—alongside cask ale (London Pride is ever-present); traditional Irish music in the evenings and pork pies on the bar; Celtic Knot patterns on the windows and a bar billiards table; an annual Irish cask beer festival and the Jack in the Green May Day celebrations, which date back to the Coyles’ time in charge of the pub, in 1984.

This blend might seem odd, depending on where you come from, but it’s natural here (and, for that matter, in some other English cities). In the 20th century most Irish migrants came to Britain, and—perhaps inevitably, given the shared culture of pubgoing—Irish publicans have had a huge impact on London’s pubs. There’s Binnie Walsh, who made The Harp a must-visit for beer-lovers; Oisín Rogers, landlord of Soho’s hugely successful Devonshire and now surely London’s most famous landlord; and Gerry O’Brien, who ran Kensington’s Churchill Arms—to name just three.

The Gallaghers deserve to be on this list, too. Charlie, who died earlier this year, and Eileen gave The Dog and Bell a special atmosphere. “I looked after the pub a few times when Charlie and Eileen were on holiday, when the cooking was done in a tiny galley kitchen in the flat,” Chris says. “It was great fun and everyone knew everyone. We had a few lock-ins in the days before all-day opening—and when our friend Abe [Keith James] lost his keys, they put us up for the night. I still go there every time I’m back in the UK.”

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In 2024, Aaron D’Costa became Deptford’s King of the Pickles. He swept the board at the Dog and Bell’s Pickle Festival with his Bourbon Bread and Butter pickles, winning both the pickle category and the overall competition. This was no mean feat: over 200 people entered the event, which spilled out into the kids’ playground next door. “It was seriously scaled-up this year,” Aaron, whose only previous entry was in 2020, tells me.

The Dog and Bell runs events throughout the year, but November’s Pickle Festival is the big one. First held in 1996 (dreamt up, Chris Jones believes, by Abe), the format is simple. There are eight categories: pickles (as in pickled vegetables), preserves, hot sauce, chutney, bread, cakes, arts & crafts and photography. Food entries are laid out on a long table in the pub, and customers fill their plates before voting.

In-the-know drinkers have been turning up for this free feed for years, but, as Aaron says, the event went super-sized last year, driven by the management team’s ambition and the pub’s impressive social-media reach. An adjacent children’s climbing area was commandeered and filled with outside bars, food and merchandise stalls, a stage, and the pièce de résistance, a giant green papier-mache pickle on a pedestal right in the centre of the action. Thousands attended.

All this is the brainchild of the latest team to take on the pub: Seamus O’Neill, Terry Fairley, and Eli Tancheva. Between then they have taken what made the Dog and Bell a success, and turned up the volume: the pub is bigger inside and out, the decoration more impressive, the events ever more lavish and outlandish. It’s undeniably less bohemian than it once was, but it still buzzes with excitement and possibility on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s become very fashionable, a process perhaps best exemplified by a vest made from its beer towels, yours for just £198.

The pub’s latest new crowd has arrived, some of them presumably resident in recently constructed flats close to the pub. Is this the new Deptford? “Tourists from East London,” John says, with a cackle.

But, as Des points out, people have long travelled from far and wide to the Dog and Bell. As far back as the mid-19th century, indeed, when the sea shanty “Homeward Bound” namechecked the pub and its landlord, Archer, as offering “good liquor” to those recently returned to the capital. These days, London pubs need to offer a bit more than good liquor—but few, surely, go as far as the Dog and Bell.