The Fox and Anchor

The Fox and Anchor is a grade-II listed pub on Charterhouse Street, five minutes from Farringdon station, and its breakfast has outlasted every trend that’s tried to replace it. It’s kept the market’s original early licensing tradition alive — this is a pub that was built to serve Smithfield’s meat traders finishing a night shift, and it still opens at an hour most restaurants would consider the middle of the night.

The Room

A long wooden bar, dark green tiles, etched glass, and a series of private snugs. The snugs in particular are worth requesting if the plan is a proper sit-down breakfast rather than a quick stop at the bar — they give the room a genuine sense of privacy that the open bar area doesn’t, and turn what could be a standing-only pub visit into proper sit-down dining.

The grade-II listing covers original Victorian fittings that most pubs of this age lost decades ago to renovation — the etched glass and dark green tiles are original rather than a period-style reproduction, and that authenticity is part of what separates a pub like this from the many newer “traditional” pubs built to imitate the look.

Early morning light through the front windows gives the room a particular warmth around breakfast service that disappears once the working day properly gets going outside.

What to Order

The City Boy breakfast: two sausages, bacon, black pudding, fried egg, tomato, mushrooms, beans, fried bread — paired with a pewter tankard of Guinness, which is very much part of the tradition rather than an eccentric add-on. This is not a delicate breakfast, and ordering it as anything less than a full plate rather misses the point.

Every component is done properly rather than as filler around the centrepiece sausages — the black pudding in particular is a genuinely good version, rich without being overpowering, and the beans are clearly not simply tinned and reheated without care.

Later in the day, the kitchen shifts into more conventional pub lunch and dinner territory, and it’s worth knowing the breakfast menu has a cut-off time — arriving expecting the City Boy plate at 2pm is a common and avoidable disappointment for first-time visitors.

The Drinks List

Cask ales on hand pump, a small wine list, and Guinness the way it ought to be — served in the pewter tankard if you want the full, traditional version of the ritual rather than a standard glass.

The ale selection rotates regularly enough that a regular rarely finds the same pump clip twice in a row, which keeps a habitual early-morning visit from ever feeling routine, and the bar staff are happy to pour a small taster before committing to a full pint for anyone unsure.

There are also a handful of rooms upstairs, run as a small boutique hotel above the pub itself, which explains why the bar sees a steady trickle of overnight guests wandering down for breakfast still half-dressed for the day ahead — a detail that adds a slightly different texture to the morning crowd than a purely local trade would.

What You Will Pay

Breakfast service around £22; a full lunch around £35, fair value for genuinely traditional pub cooking done properly rather than reheated.

The Verdict

Go at 07:30. Order the pewter pint. This early opening isn’t a novelty gimmick — it’s the pub doing what it’s always done, and turning up at the intended hour is the best way to experience it as designed. The 4-star rating here is really a breakfast rating specifically; judged purely on its evening pub-dinner menu, this review would probably land a notch lower.

What’s Being Said

A Smithfield market tradition that still opens at seven for the traders who built the neighbourhood — everyone else just gets to share the room, and knowing that history changes how the whole visit feels, even for someone who’s never worked a market shift in their life.

The pub’s early licence dates back to a genuine practical need — meat porters finishing overnight shifts wanting a proper cooked breakfast and a pint rather than a coffee — and Smithfield Market’s own hours have shifted considerably since, yet the pub has kept the same rhythm rather than adjusting to a more conventional office-crowd schedule.

That refusal to modernise its opening hours purely for convenience is exactly the kind of detail that separates an authentic market pub from one merely dressed to look like it belongs to that history.