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The Grapes is a Grade II listed public house situated directly on the north bank of the Thames in London's Limehouse area, with a veranda overlooking the water. To its landward side, the pub is found at number 76 in Narrow Street, flanked by former warehouses now converted to residential and other uses.
The Grapes is owned in partnership by the actor Sir Ian McKellen, the theatre and film director Sean Mathias, and Evgeny Lebedev, publisher of the Evening Standard newspaper.
The current building dates from the 1720s and is on the site of a pub built in 1583. It was formerly a working-class tavern serving the dockers of the Limehouse Basin. In the 1930s it sold beer from the adjacent brewery owned by Taylor Walker. It survived the intense bombing of the area in World War II, and is just outside the Docklands commercial zone built in the 1980s.
Limehouse was settled early as a dry bank suitable for growing, easy building upon and import, export, chandlery and fishing—most of many times wider Poplar to the east was the low-lying fields of the Isle of Dogs used for the keeping of marsh sheep with the national markets in the City just west. To the west before the City were the similar small wharf and early built-up 'Tower Division of Middlesex hamlets' of Ratcliff, Shadwell, Wapping and St Katherine by the Tower each with their own urban settlements; together with Limehouse covering no more than a square mile in total. By Queen Elizabeth I's time, Limehouse joined with its neighbours as a doorway to world trade in the City and to ships embarking across the British Empire; a contemporary Limehouse-based world explorer was Sir Humphrey Gilbert. From directly below The Grapes, Sir Walter Raleigh set sail on his third voyage to the New World.
In 1661, Samuel Pepys' diary records his trip to lime kilns at the jetty just along from The Grapes.
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