Essay3 August 2026 · London · Heritage

Davy's — 155 years of sawdust and candles

A family wine merchant that started off the Strand in 1870, opened the Boot & Flogger in a Southwark cellar in 1964 and helped define the modern London wine bar, and still lists fifteen London sites of its own — bars, cellars, wine-shop-tasting-rooms, a bar-and-grill and one specialist tobacconist, of which fourteen are actually trading — plus three El Vino sisters brought in in 2015. In 2007 the chain had 37 sites; more than half of the family-name ones have gone since.

In 2012, hanging under the BANGERS TOO pub sign at 1 St Mary at Hill, was a smaller sign in gold letters on black: Davys · Fine Wines and Eating. A year later the lease ran out, the pub closed, and 1 St Mary at Hill became a Bengali restaurant called Jamdani. The Davy's marque above the door came down with it.

That's the story of a lot of Davy's over the last fifteen years. The chain has been quietly editing itself down — closing sites, letting leases run out, folding branches into offices and restaurants. But it isn't gone. Fifteen sites are on Davy's own current listing (fourteen actually trading; the Crusting Pipe still on the page but closed since Christmas 2025), some of them in the same cellars they've been in for forty years, most of them still following the house formula: stone floors, candle stubs, port bottles racked to head height, and — if you know to ask — Old Wallop pulled through a hand pump. This is where that formula came from and what's left of it.

1870 — Rising Sun, off the Strand

Francis Edwin Davy opened The Rising Sun just off the Strand in 1870, calling it a "wine house." The site was chosen for its proximity to the new Charing Cross railway station and the trade the trains would bring — commuting City workers, day-trippers into town from Kent. In its first decades the business was more merchant than bar: FE Davy became a major shipper of Port, particularly for the London club trade, and in 1902 introduced the first of what the family still call their "own-label" wines. Those own labels remain, per the company's own account, "the cornerstone of our range" today.

Davy's is now on its fifth generation. The second (JHH Davy) took the business through the First World War and the General Strike of 1926. The third (SJE Davy) ran it through the Second — during which, per the company history, "customers had to bring their own glasses," and the original Barking cellars were lost in the Blitz. There is a photograph on the Davy's site of a lady scrubbing the front step of The Alfred's Head, 140 Newington Causeway, while men repair bomb damage behind her. The family kept trading.

1964 — the Boot & Flogger and the London wine-bar template

The fourth-generation head of the firm, John Davy, opened The Boot & Flogger on Redcross Way near London Bridge in 1964. Davy's own copy calls it "the birth of what would become the UK wine bar phenomenon," which oversells it — El Vino on Fleet Street had been going since 1879, the Ebury Wine Bar in Pimlico since 1959, and James Davy is honest about it in the Lander interview: this wasn't the founding of the movement so much as its most durable prototype. What Davy did was take a repeatable format — cellar, candles, port bottles racked to head height, house pours in pewter — and set it up as a proper chain. The Boot & Flogger was the seminal catalyst, not the origin.

Nor is the name a groan-worthy pub pun: a boot and a flogger are the two hand tools a Victorian merchant used to bottle wine by hand — the boot being the shoe that held the empty bottle upright, the flogger a mallet-like contraption that drove the cork home. Davy's runs on these small acts of vintners' literacy.

Getting the room open was the wrinkle. As John Davy put it — via James, in Lander's interview — "back then there were only three kinds of places to get a drink close to the City: the tea houses, pubs, which were strictly controlled by the brewers, and The Savoy. That was it." The brewery-influenced licensing magistrates weren't going to grant a wine bar; one reportedly told the family the room wasn't needed because "no wine bars existed at the time." Davy sidestepped the whole system by taking a free vintner's licence under his Vintners' Company membership — an ancient City freeman right that let him sell wine only, as a sole trader, within the City and along the historic port-route to the docks, without a magistrate's licence at all. The Boot & Flogger opened, poured, and the phrase "wine bar" entered the general London vocabulary in Davy's specific dialect. (The Redcross Way site is still there — technically owned personally by John Davy rather than the group.)

By the 1970s the wine-shop side of the business had been sold off to fund the bar rollout. The chain hit its stride in 1980, opening a site in newly-refurbished Covent Garden with, per the family history, "customers queued out of the door." Late-Thatcher London was a wine-bar city for about a decade — Davy's was the version of that scene that had actually been running the same room for a hundred years, not the version that had opened in a converted warehouse the year before. By 2007, when Nick Lander wrote up the chain for the FT (later republished on Jancis Robinson's site), the count was 37 wine bars and restaurants from Canary Wharf to White City — with the naming style at peak Davy's whimsy: Bung Hole Cellars, Skinkers, Tappit Hen, the Crusting Pipe. Which makes the 2025 loss of the Crusting Pipe land as something more than administrative attrition.

The Davy's formula

Every Davy's writes the same short list on the tin: stone-flagged floors, dark wood fittings, bottle racks and candlelight — that's the CAMRA description of Davy's at St James's, and it's transferable. Nick Lander, in that 2007 FT piece, called the interiors "the quintessential low-maintenance approach — spit and sawdust floors and empty bottles, of every possible size, on any available ledge and shelf." Sawdust used to be more literal than it is now; the phrase "sort of posh spit-and-sawdust," attributed to James Davy (fifth generation, currently at the helm) via Lander, does the job of two adjectives.

Their house ale is called Old Wallop. It used to be cask; since the pandemic it's mostly been on keg, though a Londonist visit to Truckles of Pied Bull Yard in 2009 caught the tail-end of the older regime — "imbibe Old Wallop from pewter tankards" — with Old Wallop still on the downstairs handpump before the pandemic-era keg shift. The pewter is real, not stagecraft; the pots are the tankards Davy's use, and the beer is cheaper by the four-pint jug than by the pint — a survival of vintners' economics from an era when the price of the vessel was part of the pour.

What was actually under the Old Wallop badge is one of those things that everyone-in-the-know knows and nobody-else-quite-does. The old City tankard pour was remembered by long-time regulars (and London CAMRA reporting of the era) as Courage Directors Bitter — 4.8% ABV, "Superior Ale" est. 1787 — but PINtPOINT's current profile for Davy's Old Wallop is lighter (4.2%, session-bitter rather than ESB), so today's beer may have drifted, been re-specified, or simply be recorded differently. Spitfire — Shepherd Neame, different brewery, different county — is a patron guess that turns up occasionally at the taps but isn't the answer for the classic City tankard pour.

The menu is very Davy's too, and famously has been forever. Four items — chicken liver pâté, a plate of Alderton ham from Suffolk with hot buttered potatoes, a plate of rare beef with the same, and treacle tart with clotted cream — have been on the card, Lander noted, "since the beginning." It's not gastropub cooking and it never has been; Lander's own verdict was that the wine, the pricing and the hospitality all outran the kitchen. The frame is wine-bar heritage, not culinary ambition, and that's the honest way to walk in.

The bar staff, at St James's and one or two of the others, still work in white shirts and ties. The room fills with what CAMRA politely calls a "largely besuited clientele." The visual signature — sawdust and candles, wood and bottle racks, port glasses on marble — has been so stable for so long that walking into one Davy's for the first time feels like walking back into a Davy's you've been to before, even if you haven't.

The Bangers Too entrance at 1 St Mary at Hill, EC3, in 2012. The hanging sign reads BANGERS TOO with a smaller Davys · Fine Wines and Eating roundel beneath. Chalkboard outside advertises 'Bangers Xmas Party' bookings.
Bangers Too at 1 St Mary at Hill, EC3 — the last Christmas season before the lease ran out. Davy's ran the site for more than twenty years; by 2013 it was a Bengali restaurant. The hanging Davys · Fine Wines and Eating sign is visible under the pub sign. Photo: Ewan Munro, 2012 (used with permission).

The ghosts: Bangers, Boots and the slow thinning of Davy's

The Davy's brand ran two adjacent City sites for years, each named — with a house-style groan — "Bangers." Bangers Too at 1 St Mary at Hill was the Fenchurch Street one, running for the better part of two decades until its lease ran out in 2012; 1 St Mary at Hill became Jamdani the following year, and the shot above is from what was effectively the pub's farewell December. Bangers proper — Eldon House, 2–12 Wilson Street, EC2M — held on longer. It closed for the pandemic on 23 March 2020 and never reopened; the site was granted planning consent for office conversion and the pub was permanently closed in August 2021. A Tripadvisor review posted around then, mourning the closure, called it "one of the last 'real' Davys wine bars and restaurants in the City." That was the sound the brand made losing two of its bigger addresses in a decade.

The count now sits at fifteen Davy's-operated London sites on their own current tally (fourteen actually trading — the Crusting Pipe still on the page but closed since Christmas 2025), with three El Vino sisters alongside — and a ghost list that includes not just Bangers and the Crusting Pipe, but two different lives of the Tappit Hen name. Together they sketch the pattern of a shrinking chain — leases run out, sites redeveloped, revivals opened and let go, one entire Charing Cross classic reborn as a French bistro and then lost to lockdown.

The Crusting Pipe — lower ground floor of the Covent Garden market hall — closed on 21 December 2025, after 45 years. Opened 1980, it was one of the sites that rode the wine-bar boom in: a bright arched cellar under the piazza's pillars, house Port and a menu that leaned toward Iberian cured meats. Davy's cited "evolving trading environments and changing consumer habits", which is polite phrasing for a Covent Garden lease at Covent Garden money. The room is being taken by Mr Fogg's Tavern.

The City Boot ran for 41 years off the Barbican Highwalk at 7 Moorfields Highwalk EC2Y — a Davy's classic wedged into the elevated pedestrian network above London Wall — before the site was redeveloped in 2017. Davy's relocated it a short walk east to 3 Bastion Highwalk, 125 London Wall; the new City Boot opened September 2017 and closed just two years later in September 2019. CAMRA still lists it as "closed long-term, seeking new tenants" six years on. Two goes at the same corner of the City network, both ended by the developers before the drinkers.

City FOB, on Lower Thames Street EC3R under the Monument end of London Bridge, was the platonic 1980s City Davy's. The 1986 CAMRA guide caught it at full pomp: "exclusive rather pricey cellar bar, sawdust on the floor, wood seating, pints (no halves allowed) in pewter tankards. City dress only." It closed in 2010; the building still stands but the pub is gone.

Skinkers at 42 Tooley Street, just east of London Bridge, was another Lander-era City Davy's — one of the whimsy names on the 2007 list. Closed January 2013 to make way for the Network Rail redevelopment of London Bridge Station (the Shard-era rebuild swallowed a run of Tooley Street trade); CAMRA marked it permanently closed in March 2019, the site now restaurant use. The Ewan Munro Flickr shot of its hanging sign is the frontage image we have on file.

The Tappit Hen (Charing Cross) / Terroirs — 5 William IV Street WC2N — was the older and better-remembered of the two Tappit Hens Davy's have run. A deep-cellar Charing Cross classic; its vault level was specifically labelled "The Tappit Hen", after the old Scottish three-quart wine measurement. Davy's closed it as the Tappit Hen by mid-2007 (a Qype/Yelp review lamenting the loss still sits online, over eighteen years old). The site reopened in 2008 as Terroirs, a natural-wine French bistro that kept the atmospheric basement. Per CAMRA it closed 15 December 2020 in the second lockdown "future uncertain"; the permanent-closure notice landed June 2021.

The Tappit Hen (St Swithin's Lane) was the revival — Davy's took the name back in July 2019, opening a City version at 21–23 St Swithin's Lane just off the Bank end of Cannon Street (PA Life trade press covered the opening). It didn't last long: by the early 2020s the room had passed to Bar 1790, a Portuguese wine bar linked to the Sandeman house, which trades there now. For a strange couple of years, the revived Tappit Hen name at St Swithin's Lane overlapped with Terroirs still trading in the old Charing Cross Tappit Hen cellar — same lineage, two rooms, one recently reawakened name.

All nine are ghosts in PINtPOINT now, cross-linked back to their sites (and where relevant to their successor tenants — Mr Fogg's for the Crusting Pipe, Bar 1790 for the St Swithin's Tappit Hen) with archive photography where we have it and a "then / now" toggle so you can see them as they were and see what stands there today.

The fifteen Davy's still list

Davy's currently list fifteen non–El Vino London sites of their own — bars, cellars, wine-shop-tasting-rooms, a bar-and-grill and one specialist tobacconist — though that public list still includes the Crusting Pipe, which closed in December 2025. Not all fifteen fly the family name: the group runs bars under wine-cellar names (Grapeshots, Truckles, Boot & Flogger, Bunghole Cellars), a bar-and-grill (Factory House, in Leadenhall Market), retail shops with tasting bars (Davy's Wine Shop and Davy's Wine House, in Greenwich and Holborn) and even a specialist tobacconist (Segar & Snuff Parlour in Covent Garden). The full list, in the shape Davy's themselves publish:

Fourteen of the fifteen appear to be actually trading; the fifteenth, the Crusting Pipe, remains on Davy's own site but has already passed into the ghost list above. One earlier version of this piece also cited Davy's Wine Bar at 201 Wood Lane W12 (Hammersmith) in the survivors list — that site is no longer on Davy's current wine-bars page. Investigation open on whether it closed, rebranded, or is no longer Davy's-operated; we'll ghost it once confirmed.

The El Vino sisters

Davy's acquired the El Vino group in 2015 — the Fleet Street institution and its sisters, run as sibling operations under the same ownership but with their own signage, menus and identity. Not pure-Davy's, but part of the same portfolio, and tagged chain:davys in PINtPOINT alongside the family-name sites so a chain filter surfaces both.

All fifteen sites Davy's list (the fourteen currently trading, plus the Crusting Pipe which sits both on Davy's page and in the ghost list here), all three El Vinos and the historic Davy's ghosts carry a chain:davys tag in PINtPOINT; successor tenants such as Bar 1790 are linked through predecessor/successor relationships rather than treated as Davy's venues.

Davy's vs Firkin — two ways to run a chain

The Davy's story sits alongside the Firkin one as two very different pillars of London chain drinking. Both used sawdust on the floor; they used it for opposite reasons.

Davy's (from 1870) is a traditional wine and ale house — candle-lit tables, private alcoves, house Port, Old Wallop in pewter tankards. Sophisticated, timeless, atmospheric. A family business that's still a family business.

Firkin (1979–2001) was the brewpub revolution — unpretentious, loud, boisterous neighbourhood locals; puns for names (Frog & Firkin, Pheasant & Firkin); Dogbolter brewed downstairs. David Bruce built it from one South London pub to 44 in fifteen years; the chain died when the brewing did.

Two iconic, contrasting pillars of London drinking culture — one still holding its rooms; the other now remembered as much for what it lost as for what it built.

Davy's has never been in a hurry, which is part of why it's still here. A chain that opens a handful of sites a decade and closes a handful more isn't chasing scale. It's tending a room that was old when the founder's grandson took it over, and passing it on. The stubs of candle in the wax rings on the shelf above the bar are the point, not the marketing. When a Davy's does close — as Skinkers did in 2013, Terroirs (the old Tappit Hen) in 2020, Bangers in 2021, the St Swithin's Tappit Hen revival not long after, and the Crusting Pipe just before Christmas 2025 — the room usually goes with it: the sawdust vacuumed up, the tankards packed off to the next site, the sign taken down. The 2012 shot at St Mary at Hill caught the sign coming down, though nobody knew it yet.

The fourteen still trading are, between them, most of the argument for why the chain outlasted the wine-bar boom. Not because they refused to change, but because the change was inside the room, not visible from the door.

Further reading