Stepney Folk

The Grapes

The Grapes public house, immortalised in Our Mutual Friend as the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters Tavern kept by Miss Abbey Potterson.

Miss Abbey Potterson in her bar
by Marcus Stone from Our Mutual Friend (1865)

From Our Mutual Friend 'a tavern of dropsical appearance long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally, it was a narrow lop-sided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.'

The Grapes at Limehouse (1930's) from the foreshore.
The building on the right is the Grapes.
The building on the left is the Harbour Master's office.
Whistler made an etching of the Grapes.