Deep in the grimy, dimly lit back roads of King’s Cross is a pub, a boozer in the truest sense of the word. McGlynn’s, it’s called, and when its landlord Gerry died in 2023, the pub died with him; it became just another ex-pub in a city full of ex-pubs. It was a special, unique place, a surviving slice of pre-gentrification London where you could still get a round in without taking out a mortgage, and order a plate of stew to sober yourself up too.
But the painter Peter Doig and his partner the gallerist Parinaz Mogadassi weren’t going to allow McGlynn’s to crumble to dust, or fall into the hands of developers to be turned into yet more poorly built flats. They bought the beautiful building opposite to turn into a gallery (with a show by the photographer Merry Alpern opening on 13 October, organised by Tramps), and when Gerry died and McGlynn’s came up for sale, “I just said, we have to find a way of securing it, and then figure out what to do with it,” Doig says.
So they stepped in. They weren’t the highest bidders, but they wrote to the family and promised to keep it as a pub, and stay true to McGlynn’s original spirit. Now they’ve submitted a planning application which promises that “by reinstating original elements where possible and carefully managing modern interventions, the works will preserve the building’s special architectural and historic interest while ensuring it can continue to function as a viable public house.”
Doig says, “I think when you first walk in, you’re going to feel like you’re in the same place. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s going to feel familiar.” And he should know what familiar is when it comes to McGlynn’s. “I lived next door from 1980-86, [paying] £4 per week ‘rent’. Then for the next 11 years, 200 yards away on the opposite side of King’s Cross in a building that was basically part of the station. We used to play football in Argyle Square back then and after go for a drink at McGlynn’s. Halcyon days.”
McGlynn’s holds a special place in my heart too. It’s the pub I went to for weekly pre-pandemic work drinks, it’s the pub I watched England get tantalisingly close to actually winning something in; I sat next to a table full of RMT union big wigs right after they’d brought the country to a standstill. I played with the pub cat, watched the landlord tell off tourists, I spoke to friends, had a good time, over and over again.
McGlynn’s is not unique in those terms, because that’s the power of any good pub. It becomes a container of memory, a site of joy where you can link specific moments in your life to the objects on the wall, the people behind the bar, the patterns in the carpet.
And now it’s being taken over by someone with a love and knowledge of its past. It’s not some faceless pub chain, or some developers with a warehouse full of tatty old distressed furniture to fill it with. Though doing it up isn’t without its challenges. The pub is Grade II listed, and crumbling in places. “It’s like trying to fix a rotten tooth,” Doig says.
The stats for pub closures in London make for relatively grim reading. Between 2004 and 2024, London lost an estimated 930 pubs. But pubs don’t just close, they change. When landlords sell up or die—as happened with McGlynn’s—favourite haunts become something new, and almost always something worse.
The Albion on Goldsmith’s Row, the William the IVth in Leytonstone, just two pubs that were once something special and are now something bland.
And whatever McGlynn’s becomes, it won’t be bland. Hearing that it’s coming back is like hearing that a sick friend is pulling through, they’re going to be ok, they’re going to survive.
I had just one request for Doig: show the football. Big screens. Commentary on. Please. He said no. “But it’ll be a special pub, I promise.”
