Legendary local the Golden Anchor is known for its music nights, tasty Caribbean food and community vibe. We popped in for a chat with landlady Lana Bewry, who has run the pub for 20 years.
From outside, the Golden Anchor on Nunhead’s Evelina Road looks like a typical neighbourhood corner pub – albeit with some cheerful pot plants out the front. But step through the door and it becomes clear this place is something a bit different. With a tropical palm tree mural on the wall behind her, and serving up a cool glass of Ting, landlady Lana Bewry (pictured above with her partner Greg) has run the Caribbean-flavoured pub for 20 years now.
Before that the landlady, who grew up on Queen’s Road, worked behind the bar there on Sundays and at other Peckham and Nunhead pubs too, while working for Royal Bank of Scotland during the week.
“It looked so dirty and dingy compared to the last time I’d seen it,” she says of the moment she stepped into the pub she’d just taken over. “It felt like we spent months cleaning it. I wanted it clean, full of customers and full of people dancing.”She ripped up the old, sticky carpet – “I remembered there was a lovely parquet floor underneath. I pulled up the carpet and there it was” – and bringing the pub back up to her own high standards, as well as setting up a kitchen serving authentic Caribbean cuisine.
Been So Long with Michaela Coel
The pub has recently been dressed up for another reason: it was used as a film set for an upcoming British movie called Been So Long. The film, which stars BAFTA-winning actress Michaela Coel (of hit comedy “Chewing Gum” fame), used the Golden Anchor as a classic London venue. The crew transformed the pub’s back room into an 1980s-style cocktail bar: “It was a really great experience,” says Lana.