Drink in the pub where Lenin and Stalin 'first met'

Whilst recorded history has it that that a young Joseph Stalin first met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at the Bolshevik Congress in Tsarist Finland in 1905, London legend has it that they actually met a couple of years earlier in the pub which is now the Crown Tavern, on Clerkenwell Green.


Lenin had recently moved the publication of the Russian socialist newspaper Iskra to Clerkenwell Green, and was living on nearby Percy Circus, a short walk away. The legend goes that the two met in the Crown and Anchor pub, which has since been renamed the Crown Tavern, when the Stalin came to London to train as a Bolshevik. At the time, Clerkenwell was a hotbed of leftism.

Whether or not it is true we will never know. Probably not, but it's a nice pub with an interesting history anyway. In Victorian times the upstairs Apollo Lounge was the ‘Apollo Concert Hall’, with nightly music hall entertainment. More recently, and with less impact on world history, Dame Judi Dench is seen in Crown in the film ‘Notes On A Scandal’.

For more information, see the pub's website at http://thecrowntavernec1.co.uk/.

_{^Picture by the fantastic Ewan-M^}