A converted former London pub in Stoke Newington is on the market for £2 million with Savills — and still features a rooftop drinking terrace and a bar in the living room.
The Earl of Warwick on Beatty Road operated as a public house in the Eighties, and was later converted into house in the late Nineties. The building itself is much older, dating from the 1850s.
Plenty of original features from throughout the property's history have been preserved, including fire places and a tiled stove in the brick hearth of the large kitchen.
The exterior façade has also been kept as it was in its pub days, with the original signage advertising 'Whitbread's Ale and Stout'.
Its ground floor is currently a garage and houses two of the five bedrooms. A staircase leads up to a mostly open plan living area — complete with a corner bar — a large eat-in kitchen, and another bedroom.
There are two more bedrooms on the second floor, along with a bathroom with a vintage-looking sink set in a wooden counter with a tiled back.
On the top floor there's a home office with windows and doors opening on to a rooftop terrace with views over the city.
"The home comes with a real sense of history having once been such a central feature of local community life," said James Marshall, head of Savills Hackney and Victoria Park.
"The building was converted for residential use some years ago and comes with planning permission for further refurbishment which allows a future owner to put their own stamp on it."
The Earl of Warwick is one of many of former pubs converted into housing throughout the capital.
Local memory suggests that it was regularly frequented by the local police force, whose station is still just around the corner.
"I squatted in Beatty Road during 1984 and at that time we frequented many of the local pubs," Michael Victor posted on the Closed Pubs website.
"However, the Earl of Warwick was not one of them as the whole community knew that it was the preferred drinking place of the local Constabulary."
Pete Philips, who lived on Beatty Road between 1980 and 1982 while studying to be a pharmacist and later working at the Royal Free, had similar recollections.
"The Earl of Warwick was our local, but it took us a while to work out why last orders wasn't always called at 10.50, i.e., due to the police from Stoke Newington police station calling the shots," he wrote.
The Whitbread's signage speaks to the history of this British company, which is best known today as the owners of Premier Inn and restaurant chain beefeater.
Founded as a brewery in Old Street in 1742, it became the largest brewery business in the world, taking advantage of restrictions placed on selling spirits during London's gin craze by offering beer instead.
Whitbread once owned thousands of pubs, but began to sell them off in the Nineties, around the time the Earl of Warwick ceased trading.
