Golden Heart, London

A good, relaxed place to soak up the atmosphere of a typical inter-war pub. The Golden Heart has an elegant, three-sided Neo-Georgian frontage facing Spitalfields Market. It was built by the major local brewers, Truman, Hanbury and Buxton, on a corner site around 1930 and is just a few yards away from the company’s very different Ten Bells.

This pub has two bars either side of a central servery but a blocked doorway in the centre indicates how the larger bar on the right is an amalgamation of two original rooms. This enlarged public bar is rather plainer than the other one but both have extensive panelling, brick fireplaces (note the Truman’s eagle over a couple in the public bar) and Truman’s house-style lettering for the advertising inscriptions running along the top of the panelling. Note also the pleasing dimpled and coloured glass in the windows. None of this is showy and represents one of the two main faces of interwar pub-building – the careful, restrained Georgian one as opposed to nostalgic ‘brewers’ Tudor’. The one real blemish here is the modern pot-shelf on the public bar counter.