The Flask

A Pub at the Top of the World

The Flask sits at the western end of Highgate's High Street, at the point where the road curves around the village green and the ground falls away towards Hampstead Heath with a sudden drama that catches first-time visitors by surprise. The pub's position is superb — perhaps the finest of any pub in London — commanding a view that extends across the heath's wooded slopes to the towers of central London and, on clear days, to the hills of Surrey beyond. It is a view that has drawn drinkers to this spot for over three and a half centuries, and one that the pub's succession of landlords have exploited with a commercial instinct that would have impressed the coaching inn proprietors who first established the business in the seventeenth century.

The building itself is a handsome composition of dark brick and white-painted woodwork, its facade presenting the slightly irregular geometry that betrays multiple phases of construction and alteration over several centuries. The earliest parts of the structure date from 1663, when the pub was first licensed, though there is evidence of a drinking establishment on the site from at least the early part of that century. The current appearance is largely Georgian, the result of a comprehensive rebuilding in the eighteenth century that gave the pub its elegant sash windows, its pedimented doorcase, and the general air of prosperous respectability that distinguishes Highgate's buildings from the more bohemian architecture of neighbouring Hampstead. This is a pub that has always known its own worth.

The name "Flask" has nothing to do with drinking vessels. It refers to the trade in flask-bottled water from the chalybeate springs that once bubbled from the hillside near the village green. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when London's drinking water was an open sewer and mineral springs were valued for their supposed medicinal properties, the springs at Highgate attracted visitors from across the metropolis, and enterprising locals bottled the water in flasks for sale to those who could not make the journey. The pub served as one of the distribution points for this trade, and the name stuck long after the springs dried up and the fashion for chalybeate water gave way to the fashion for gin. It is one of those names that preserves a forgotten economic reality in the fabric of everyday language, and it gives the pub a connection to Highgate's commercial past that most of its current patrons are entirely unaware of.

The Coaching Inn Years

Highgate's position on the Great North Road made it a natural stopping point for travellers heading to and from London, and the village's inns and taverns thrived on the coaching trade throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Flask was one of several establishments that catered to this traffic, offering food, drink, stabling, and accommodation to the steady stream of merchants, drovers, post-riders, and ordinary travellers who passed through the village on their way to the northern counties and Scotland. The coaching inn was the backbone of pre-railway transport, and the Flask's role in this network gave it an importance that extended far beyond the local community.

The coaching trade shaped the pub's physical form. The courtyard at the rear, now used as a beer garden, was originally a stable yard where horses were changed and carriages serviced. The rooms above the main bar were coaching bedrooms, available by the night to travellers who arrived too late or too tired to continue their journey. The cellars, which extend beneath the full footprint of the building and then some, were designed to store the quantities of beer, wine, and spirits required to service a steady flow of thirsty passengers. The scale of the building — considerably larger than a village pub would normally require — reflects the scale of the trade that sustained it, and the quality of the construction — solid brick walls, well-proportioned rooms, substantial timber framing — reflects the profits that the trade generated.

The coaching era also brought Highgate its most colourful association: the legend that Dick Turpin, the highwayman, used the Flask as a hideout during his operations on the Great North Road. The legend is almost certainly apocryphal — Turpin was hanged in 1739, and there is no documentary evidence linking him to the Flask or to Highgate — but it has proved remarkably persistent, sustained by the pub's location on the road that Turpin allegedly haunted and by the existence of various cellars, cupboards, and passages that have been identified, at various times, as "Turpin's hiding place." The Flask is not the only pub in north London to claim a Turpin connection — half the old coaching inns between Islington and Barnet make the same assertion — but it makes the claim with a confidence that discourages further investigation.

The Spa Water Trade

The chalybeate springs that gave the Flask its name were part of a broader phenomenon that transformed several north London villages into fashionable health resorts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hampstead had its wells, Islington had its spa, and Highgate had its springs — mineral-rich waters that emerged from the clay and gravel of the hilltop and were credited, with the optimism characteristic of the period, with the power to cure everything from rheumatism to melancholy. The springs at Highgate were never as famous as those at Hampstead or Tunbridge Wells, but they attracted a steady clientele of Londoners seeking relief from the ailments of urban life, and the trade in bottled spring water was sufficiently profitable to justify the infrastructure needed to sustain it.

The Flask's role in the water trade was essentially that of a retail outlet. Water from the nearby springs was bottled in the distinctive flask-shaped containers that gave the pub its name and sold to visitors who came to Highgate specifically for the purpose. The pub also served as a gathering point for those who had come to take the waters, offering refreshment of a less medicinal kind to supplement the supposed health benefits of the chalybeate spring. The combination of spa water and strong ale may seem paradoxical, but it was entirely characteristic of the period: the Georgians saw no contradiction between pursuing health and pursuing pleasure, and the social rituals of the spa — the promenading, the gossiping, the conspicuous consumption of both water and wine — were as much a part of the experience as any medicinal benefit.

The spa water trade declined in the late eighteenth century, killed by a combination of improving metropolitan water supply, changing medical fashion, and the arrival of the railways, which made more distant and more fashionable spa towns easily accessible to London's middle class. The springs at Highgate gradually ceased to flow as the hilltop was built upon and the water table altered by construction, and the flask-bottling business disappeared from the village economy. But the name survived, attached now to a pub that had long since found other reasons for its existence, and it remains one of those pleasing linguistic fossils that connects the modern village to a commercial past that has otherwise vanished without trace.

Famous Patrons and Local Characters

The Flask's guest list, if one could compile it across three and a half centuries, would constitute a remarkable cross-section of English cultural life. The claim that Karl Marx drank here, while difficult to verify with documentary certainty, is entirely plausible. Marx lived within walking distance for much of his London life, and his legendary Sunday walks on Hampstead Heath — boisterous, argumentative expeditions that covered miles of ground and consumed hours of talk — frequently ended at a pub, and the Flask's position at the edge of the heath would have made it a natural destination. Whether Marx debated dialectical materialism over a pint of Highgate ale is unknown, but the image is too appealing to resist, and the pub has never been reluctant to claim the association.

More reliably documented is the Flask's connection to the literary and artistic communities that have gravitated to Highgate since the eighteenth century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, during his long residence at 3 The Grove on Highgate's South Grove, was a frequent visitor to the village's pubs, and the Flask, as the most prominent of them, would have been an inevitable stop on his daily walks. William Hogarth is said to have sketched at the Flask, though the evidence is anecdotal. The Victorian painters of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, several of whom lived in or near Highgate, are also associated with the pub, and its walls have, at various times, displayed works by local artists in an informal gallery that reflects the village's longstanding connection to the visual arts.

But the Flask's real significance lies not in its famous visitors but in its role as the social centre of Highgate village life. For over three centuries, this has been the place where the community gathers — to celebrate, to commiserate, to gossip, to argue, and to perform the rituals of sociability that bind a village together. The pub's various rooms — the main bar, the snug, the upstairs dining room, the famous Committee Room — have hosted everything from parish meetings to wedding receptions, from political debates to darts tournaments, and the institution has evolved with its community, adapting to changing tastes and social customs while maintaining the essential character of a village local. The Flask is not a museum piece or a heritage attraction. It is a working pub, and its longevity is a function of its continuing usefulness to the people who drink in it.

The Architecture and the Committee Room

The Flask's interior rewards careful attention. The main bar, entered from the High Street through the pedimented doorway, is a long, low-ceilinged room with a flagstone floor, dark wood panelling, and the characteristic smell of centuries of spilled beer and wood smoke that no amount of cleaning can entirely eradicate. The room has been altered many times — the current bar counter is Victorian, the lighting is modern, and the fireplace has been rebuilt at least once — but the proportions are original, and the sense of enclosure created by the low ceiling and the dark panelling is as atmospheric now as it must have been when coaching passengers warmed themselves here after the long descent from the north.

The Committee Room, on the first floor, is the Flask's architectural jewel. It is a panelled chamber of modest size but considerable elegance, its walls lined with dark oak that may date from the original seventeenth-century building, its ceiling decorated with plasterwork that, while not of the first quality, speaks of aspirations above the ordinary. The room takes its name from its historical use as a meeting place for the various committees and societies that have governed Highgate's affairs over the centuries, and it retains an air of civic seriousness that distinguishes it from the more convivial spaces below. The oak panelling, in particular, gives the room a warmth and gravitas that modern materials cannot replicate, and the light that enters through the sash windows — filtered, on sunny afternoons, through the branches of the trees on the village green — has a quality that photography cannot capture and memory cannot forget.

The building's exterior is equally rewarding. The High Street facade is a composition of studied informality — the kind of carefully managed asymmetry that the Georgians perfected and that gives the best English vernacular architecture its distinctive character. The sash windows are of different sizes on different floors, reflecting the building's evolution from coaching inn to pub, and the brickwork shows the subtle variations of colour and texture that distinguish handmade Georgian brick from its machine-made Victorian successor. The pub sign, hanging from an iron bracket above the doorway, depicts a flask of the type that would have been used to bottle the spring water, and it swings in the wind with a creaking that is one of the characteristic sounds of Highgate's High Street.

The Flask in Village Life

To understand the Flask's place in Highgate, one must understand Highgate's place in London. The village sits at the top of one of the steepest hills in the metropolis, and this elevation — four hundred feet above the Thames — has always given it a sense of separateness from the city below. Highgate was, for most of its history, a genuine village: a self-contained community with its own shops, its own church, its own school, its own social hierarchy, and its own pub. The Flask was the focal point of this community, the place where the butcher and the banker met on equal terms, where news was exchanged and opinions formed, where the rituals of christening, marriage, and death were celebrated with the communal drinking that has accompanied English rites of passage since before the Norman Conquest.

The Flask's role as a community hub has survived the social changes that have transformed Highgate from a hilltop village into one of London's most expensive residential neighbourhoods. The pub still serves as a meeting place for local societies and groups, its rooms available for hire in a tradition that extends back centuries. The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, founded in 1839, has held meetings at the Flask. The local history society has used the Committee Room for lectures and discussions. And the informal networks of friendship and acquaintance that bind any community together still find their expression in the daily life of the pub — in the regulars who occupy the same seats at the same times, in the conversations that start at the bar and continue in the beer garden, in the nods of recognition between people who may not know each other's names but who know each other's faces from years of sharing the same drinking space.

The beer garden deserves particular mention. Occupying the old coaching yard at the rear of the building, it offers a south-facing terrace with views across the rooftops of Highgate towards the distant towers of central London. On summer evenings, when the garden is full and the light is golden and the sound of conversation mingles with birdsong from the surrounding gardens, it is as close to perfect as any outdoor drinking space in London. The garden has been extended and improved over the years, but its essential character — a sheltered, sunlit space behind a village pub, with a view that reminds you of your extraordinary good fortune in being here — has remained unchanged for as long as anyone can remember.

The Flask Endures

The pub trade in London has been in decline for decades, and the statistics are grim: over a thousand pubs have closed in the capital since the turn of the millennium, victims of rising property values, changing drinking habits, and the relentless pressure of development. The Flask has survived — and more than survived, thrived — because it possesses advantages that most London pubs cannot match: a location of incomparable beauty, a building of genuine architectural distinction, a history rich enough to sustain the interest of even the most casual visitor, and a community loyal enough to support a local pub in an age when the concept of the local is under sustained assault.

The Flask's survival is also a function of its adaptability. The pub has reinvented itself many times over its three and a half centuries — from coaching inn to spa water retailer, from Victorian local to gastropub, from traditional boozer to the kind of establishment that serves craft beer and Sunday roasts of sufficient quality to attract customers from across London. Each reinvention has preserved the essential character of the place while adapting it to the tastes and expectations of a new generation of drinkers. The current iteration — a pub that takes its food seriously without losing its identity as a drinking establishment, that welcomes tourists without alienating regulars, that honours its history without being enslaved by it — is the latest in a long line of adaptations, and it seems to be working as well as any of its predecessors.

Sit in the Flask on a winter evening, when the fire is lit in the main bar and the windows are steamed and the dark outside makes the warmth inside feel like a conspiracy against the cold, and you are sitting in one of the great continuities of London life. The building is different from the one that stood here in 1663, and the beer is different, and the people are different, but the essential transaction — warmth, drink, company, the suspension of the outside world's demands in favour of the inside world's pleasures — is unchanged. The Flask has been providing this transaction for longer than the United States has existed, and it will be providing it, if London has any sense, long after the current crisis in the pub trade has been forgotten. Some institutions are too important to lose, and a good pub at the top of a hill, with a view across London and a fire in the grate, is one of them.

*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*