Best Pubs Near Twickenham on Rugby Matchday: Local Guide
Where England fans actually drink: the pubs near Twickenham matchday crowds fill first, the walking routes from the stations, and the Richmond option.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Grounds & Tickets19 min read
- Stadium capacity
- 82,000
- Nearest station
- Twickenham
- Local authority
- Richmond upon Thames
- Ground postcode
- TW2 7BA
The RFU can put around eighty-two thousand people into a stadium on Whitton Road, and the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has to absorb every one of them through a suburban town centre with two railway platforms and a high street you can walk end to end in about ten minutes. That arithmetic is the whole story of drinking in Twickenham on an England matchday. The pubs themselves are not unusual — they are ordinary west London pubs, several of them very good — and what makes them difficult is that the demand lands in one lump, four or five Saturdays a year, and then vanishes until November.
Get the arithmetic right and the day is a pleasure. Get it wrong and you spend forty minutes on the pavement outside a pub on London Road, watching people who left home an hour earlier walk past with a pint in their hand.
What follows is the shape of the town rather than a scorecard. Pubs change hands, kitchens close, door policies get rewritten between one Six Nations and the next, and no page can tell you what a specific bar will be doing on a specific Saturday. The routes, the pinch points and the licensing rules are the parts that hold still.
What changes in Twickenham on an international matchday
Licensing is the first thing. A premises licence issued under the Licensing Act 2003 sets the hours a pub can sell alcohol, and a pub that normally opens at midday can open earlier on a specific date through a temporary event notice or a variation of its licence. Plenty of them do, which is why the town is already busy at half past ten for a mid-afternoon kick-off. What you cannot assume is that any given pub has bothered. A venue sitting on its ordinary hours will simply have a queue outside it at 11:45 and a rush at noon.
The second thing is the door. Rugby crowds are not policed the way football crowds are, and the distinction matters more than most visitors realise. The Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc.) Act 1985 applies to designated football matches, and it is the reason you cannot drink in sight of the pitch at a Premier League ground. It does not cover rugby union. Twickenham sells beer on the concourses and people carry it to their seats, which changes the entire economics of the pre-match pint — a meaningful share of the crowd never enters a pub at all.
The pubs still fill, of course. What varies is how they manage it. Some go to a wristband system sold in advance. Some charge on the door for entry, with or without a drink included. Some go ticket-holders-only in the last two hours. Some put a steward on the pavement and run one in, one out. Some do nothing and get overwhelmed.
Roads around the ground close on matchdays, and the residential streets nearest Whitton Road sit inside a controlled parking zone enforced specifically for events. Driving in is not a plan. The borough's statement of licensing policy sets out how it treats event-driven demand in the town centre, and the practical effect is a town that is stewarded rather than policed, with a great deal of visible marshalling around the station and almost none around the pub doors.
- Late morningPubs that have varied their licence open early. The town is busy but seated space still exists.
- Three hours outTown-centre pubs on the station route reach capacity. Door staff appear on London Road.
- Ninety minutes outQueues form outside. Some venues switch to wristbands, cover charges or ticket-holders-only.
- Sixty minutes outThe walk up Whitton Road becomes solid. Riverside pubs start emptying towards the ground.
- Kick-offThe town centre empties within minutes. Pubs that stayed open take the small crowd watching on screens.
The sequence of a typical international Saturday in Twickenham. Times are not fixed and shift with the kick-off slot.
The pubs on the walk from Twickenham station
Out of Twickenham station and the ground is to your left and slightly north, up London Road and then Whitton Road, a walk of a bit over half a mile. Nearly everything worth knowing about matchday drinking sits in the first few hundred metres of that walk.
The Cabbage Patch on London Road is the name every regular gives first. It takes its name from the ground itself — the site the RFU bought in 1907 was a market garden, and the stadium has been called the Cabbage Patch ever since — and it has been the default rugby pub in the town for decades, with a long association with the local live music scene in the room upstairs. On an international day it is not somewhere you casually wander into at two o'clock. Whatever system it runs on a given fixture, assume it is full and assume there is a queue.
The Wetherspoon on London Road, named for William Webb Ellis, does the job Wetherspoons always does on a matchday: high volume, fast turnover, no reservations, and a bar queue that moves faster than it looks. It is the honest choice if what you want is a pint and a seat and you do not mind who you are sitting next to.
Beyond those two the town centre thins out quickly. King Street and Church Street have the density — Church Street in particular is a short pedestrianised run of pubs and restaurants a couple of minutes from the station, and it is where a lot of people end up when London Road has defeated them. The Fox and The Eel Pie sit on it. Both are small. On a matchday, small is a problem.
What the walk itself does not have is pubs. The stretch of Whitton Road nearest the stadium is residential, and there is essentially nothing to stop at between the town centre and the gates. Anyone planning to drift up the road picking off pubs as they go has misread the geography. You drink in the town, or by the river, or at the ground, and the bit in between is just a walk. Our Twickenham Stadium guide covers what happens once you are through the turnstiles.
The riverside: Twickenham Embankment and St Margarets
Turn the other way out of the station, down through Church Street, and in five minutes you are at the Thames. This is the part of Twickenham visitors do not expect, and on a September or a warm-ish March afternoon it is the best decision available.
The White Swan sits on Riverside with its garden on the far side of the lane, hard against the water. The Thames is tidal all the way up to Teddington Lock, which is upstream of here, so on a high spring tide the water comes over the wall and the garden goes under. The pub has lived with this for its entire existence and treats it as a scheduling matter rather than a disaster. The Barmy Arms is a short walk along the Embankment with a garden facing the river and Eel Pie Island opposite. The island itself is private, a working huddle of boatyards and artists' studios that opens to the public only occasionally, so admire it and move on.
Cross Deep, running south along the river, has the Alexander Pope on it, a river-frontage hotel bar that is a different proposition from a town-centre pub and priced accordingly.
North-east of the station, St Margarets is the local's answer. It has its own railway station one stop from Twickenham, a small cluster of pubs around Winchester Road and Richmond Road, and a crowd noticeably more residential than the town centre. The Turk's Head is the anchor. The Crown and the other Richmond Road pubs take the rest. On an international day St Margarets fills perhaps an hour later than the town centre and never quite reaches the same crush, which is precisely why people who go to every game drink there.
The trade-off is the walk. From the Embankment to the gates is a good twenty-five minutes, and it is uphill in the sense that it is against the crowd. Leave earlier than feels necessary.
Richmond as a base, and the two stops to the ground
Richmond has more pubs than Twickenham by a wide margin, and it has the geography to spread a crowd across: a green with pubs on three sides, a riverside, a hill, and a town centre that absorbs a rugby crowd without noticing it.
On Richmond Green, The Cricketers and The Prince's Head face the cricket square, and on a dry day the drinking happens on the grass rather than indoors, which removes the capacity problem altogether. Down at the water, The White Cross has the most photographed flood problem in London — at a high spring tide the Thames comes across the terrace and up to the door, and the pub keeps a separate entrance for exactly that. Up Richmond Hill, The Roebuck looks out over Petersham Meadows towards the river, and that view is protected by its own Act of Parliament, the Richmond, Ham and Petersham Open Spaces Act 1902. Worth having in your pocket for the walk up the hill.
Getting to the ground from Richmond is two stops on the South Western Railway line out of Waterloo towards Reading: Richmond, St Margarets, Twickenham. The Underground and the Overground both serve Richmond but neither continues to Twickenham, so it is the mainline platform you want.
The catch is timing. Those two stops are the same two stops several thousand other people have had the same idea about, and in the ninety minutes before kick-off the trains arrive full. Travel across at least two hours before the game and you are on a normal train. Travel an hour before and you are on a platform watching full trains go past.
Richmond also works better after the match than before it, which is covered further down. The detail of which services run and how the operator handles matchday crowds is in our guide to getting to Twickenham by train.
Set the four options side by side and the choice is mostly about what you are willing to trade.
| Base | Walk to the ground | Character on matchday | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Twickenham town centre | About 15 minutes | Full by late morning, doors managed, loud | Supporters who want the crowd and a short walk |
| Twickenham Embankment | About 25 minutes | Busy but spread out, river-facing, weather-dependent | Groups with children, and warm afternoons |
| St Margarets | About 20 minutes | Residential, fills an hour later, rarely crushed | Regulars who value a seat over the atmosphere |
| Richmond | Train, two stops | Absorbs the crowd without noticing it | Long lunches, large groups, and after the match |
Which places work with children, and which do not
The Licensing Act 2003 lets accompanied children onto licensed premises, and the offence in the Act is aimed at unaccompanied under-16s on premises used exclusively or primarily for the sale of alcohol. A pub can be stricter than the law. Individual licences carry conditions, and a common one excludes under-18s after a set hour in the evening, which on a matchday can arrive earlier than the licence says because the manager has decided the room is no longer suitable.
The practical division in Twickenham is not between family pubs and other pubs. It is between pubs with a garden and a working kitchen, and pubs without.
The riverside venues on the Embankment work because children can be outside, near water but not in a crowd, with food arriving. St Margarets works for the same reason on a smaller scale. Richmond Green works best of all, because the pub is a bar and the green is the pub. Marble Hill Park, between Twickenham and St Margarets, is a genuine option for the hour before you walk to the ground — open parkland, room to run about, and fifteen minutes on foot back to the station side of town.
What does not work is the town centre in the last two hours. A room at capacity, three deep at the bar, with a queue outside and a steward on the door, is a bad place to be four feet tall. No rule prevents it and nobody will stop you. It is simply a poor experience for everyone involved, the child most of all.
The ground itself is more accommodating than the town on this front, and families going to their first England game often do better arriving early and using the stadium's own space. If you are taking children to their first international, the material on crowd behaviour in our guide to rugby matchday etiquette in England is worth reading first.
Booking a table: who takes them and who stops
Reservations on a matchday follow a simple logic. A pub that makes its money on drink has no reason to hold a table for you when it can fill the same square metre four times over with people standing. A pub or restaurant that makes its money on food has every reason to, because a booked sitting is guaranteed revenue and a controlled turnaround.
So the wet-led town-centre pubs mostly suspend bookings for international dates and say so. The food-led ones — the restaurants on Church Street, the dining pubs by the river, most of Richmond — keep taking them, and they manage the day with fixed sittings, a time limit, and a card deposit or pre-authorisation they keep if you fail to turn up.
Book early. Absurdly early, by ordinary restaurant standards. The Six Nations fixture list and the autumn international schedule are published many months in advance, and the people who go every year book the day the fixtures land. By the week of the game the only availability is the sitting nobody wants, which for an early afternoon kick-off is the one at half past eleven.
A few practical points on deposits. Read what you are agreeing to. A per-head deposit on a party of ten is a real sum, and matchday terms are often stricter than the same venue's ordinary terms: shorter cancellation windows, no partial refund for a reduced party. If your group size is uncertain, book for the number you are sure of. Adding two people to a booking is usually possible. Removing four is usually expensive.
Groups above about eight are a separate conversation everywhere. Some venues will not take them at all on a matchday. Some will only take them on a set menu with pre-orders. Some will split you across two tables in different rooms and not mention it until you arrive.
Gardens, marquees and February on the Thames
Twickenham's home internationals fall in two windows: the autumn, which is November, and the Six Nations, which is February and March. The autumn games are cold and dark. The Six Nations games are colder and, in February, frequently wet.
This matters because so much of the pre-match drinking capacity in the area is outdoor capacity. A riverside garden that comfortably holds a hundred and fifty people in September holds perhaps thirty in February, and the other hundred and twenty are inside, in a room built for sixty.
Pubs respond with structures. A marquee over a garden roughly doubles usable winter space, and the good ones are properly heated, floored and lit rather than a tent thrown over the paving. Temporary structures of any size bring their own paperwork — building control, fire safety, occasionally a licence variation — which is why the same handful of venues put one up every year and the rest never do.
The tide is the other February problem. The Thames is tidal to Teddington Lock, and the Embankment at Twickenham and the riverside at Richmond both flood on high spring tides. This is entirely predictable, published well in advance, and completely ignored by visitors, who then discover the garden they walked twenty minutes to reach is under four inches of river.
One honest note on heaters. Outdoor heating in a marquee is comfortable near the heater and cold at the edges, and the difference is larger than most people expect. If you are settling a group outdoors in February, get there early enough to choose where you sit rather than be allocated the far corner.
Food that will actually reach you before kick-off
Kitchen capacity and bar capacity are unrelated numbers, and matchday exposes the gap between them brutally. A pub can serve four hundred drinks an hour with three people behind the bar. The same pub's kitchen can plate perhaps sixty covers an hour on a good day, and on a matchday it is doing that with a kitchen porter who has never worked a Saturday like it.
Which is why so many matchday food orders take an hour to arrive, and why the sensible venues cut their menu down to four or five things that can be produced at speed and refuse everything else. A shortened matchday menu is the sign of a well-run pub, not a badly stocked one.
Eat before the crowd or eat after the match. The window from about noon to half past one on an afternoon kick-off day is when kitchens go under. Arrive at half past eleven and you will be fed properly. Arrive at one and you will be told the wait is ninety minutes, which for an early afternoon kick-off means no lunch at all.
Church Street is the densest run of actual restaurants near the station, and Richmond has considerably more. The stadium sells food on the concourses, and the ground regulations restrict what you can carry in, so the plan of buying a sandwich in town and eating it in your seat needs checking against the current regulations rather than assuming.
For a large group, the thing that works is ordering as a table in one go, early, and accepting that the food arrives when it arrives. Ordering in waves — two people now, three more when they get here — is how a group ends up eating in shifts with half of them standing.
After the whistle: where to wait out the station queue
Eighty thousand people leave a stadium in about twenty minutes and then try to enter a railway station with two platforms. The queue for Twickenham station is managed with barriers, a one-way system on the approach roads and stewards holding sections of the crowd, and it works, in the sense that everybody gets home. Quick, it is not.
The single best decision available after a match is not to join it immediately. The stadium's own bars stay open for a period after the final whistle, and staying inside for forty minutes costs you nothing and removes the worst of the wait. The alternative is to walk back into the town centre and drink there while the station clears, which is what most locals do.
Walking to St Margarets is a genuine option: twenty minutes on quieter streets to a station with a far shorter queue. Walking on to Richmond takes around three quarters of an hour along the river. In September that is a fine end to the day. In February, at seven in the evening, parts of the riverside path are unlit, and it is not a walk to attempt with a group that has had a long afternoon.
Buses run through Twickenham towards Hounslow, Richmond and Kingston, and TfL puts extra capacity on for large events, but the stops nearest the ground sit inside the road closures, so you walk to them anyway.
- Full timeConcourse bars remain open for a period. Staying put costs nothing and skips the worst of the crush.
- Plus 15 minutesWhitton Road is solid. The station approach is barriered and held in sections.
- Plus 30 minutesTown-centre pubs refill with people waiting out the queue. Kitchens are usually closed by now.
- Plus 60 minutesThe station queue is moving freely. Walkers to St Margarets are already home.
- Last trainsCheck the final departure towards your line before the match rather than after it.
The usual sequence at Twickenham after a full-capacity international. Stewarding arrangements vary by fixture.
Card-only bars, pre-paid entry and the cash question
Cash has largely gone from matchday service in this part of London, and the direction of travel is one way. The stadium runs on cards and contactless. A large number of the pubs go card-only on international days specifically because it is faster, and a faster bar is the only lever a pub has when the room is full.
The cash machines in the town centre do run out. Four or five machines serving a town that has temporarily grown by eighty thousand people is not a system that copes, and by early afternoon several of them will be empty or out of service. Any plan that depends on withdrawing cash in Twickenham on a matchday is a plan that fails.
Two practical things follow. Bring a second card. Contactless failures, a card frozen by a fraud algorithm that has noticed you spending oddly in a place you have never been, a terminal that will not read a chip — all of these happen, and the queue behind you is not sympathetic.
Expect a refusal on split payments, too. A round of eight drinks paid on four cards is four transactions, and on a bar doing four hundred drinks an hour that is a real cost. Plenty of venues put up a sign saying one payment per round on matchdays, and the ones that do not will still ask you nicely. Settle who is paying before you reach the front.
Cover charges, where a pub runs one, are almost always taken by card reader on the door, sometimes with a wristband, sometimes with a token that comes off the price of your first drink. Whether a given venue charges at all, and how much, changes between fixtures and is not something to plan a budget around.
A matchday timeline that survives contact
Kick-off times move. Six Nations matches are scheduled around broadcast windows, and the Twickenham fixture has been an early Saturday afternoon in some years, a late one in others and a Saturday evening in others again. Autumn internationals sit in their own slots. Everything below is expressed as time before kick-off rather than a clock time, because the clock time is the one thing you cannot rely on until the schedule is confirmed.
Four hours out is when the day is easy. The town is busy but not full, tables exist, kitchens are working, and the train in was normal. This is the arrival time of people who have done it before.
Three hours out is the last comfortable moment. You will get in somewhere on the station route, though possibly standing.
Two hours out and the town-centre pubs are at capacity, the riverside is filling and the queues have started. One hour out and the choice has narrowed to whichever door will still take you, which increasingly means the ground.
- Four hours outArrive in Twickenham or Richmond. Eat now, while kitchens are still functioning.
- Three hours outMove to your chosen pub. Later than this and you take what is left.
- Ninety minutes outLast realistic point to travel in from Richmond without a very full train.
- Forty-five minutes outStart the walk up Whitton Road. It is slower than the map suggests.
- Full timeDo not head straight for the station. Wait out the first half hour somewhere with a roof.
Structured around time before kick-off rather than clock times, because Twickenham kick-off slots vary by fixture and broadcaster.
Two things undo most plans. The first is underestimating the walk, which is about a quarter of an hour in normal conditions and noticeably more in a crowd moving at the pace of its slowest member. The second is a group that will not leave the pub, which is a social problem rather than a logistical one and has no timetable solution.
Anyone still working out how they are getting into the ground at all will find the ticketing routes set out in our guide to buying Twickenham tickets. Club finals bring a different crowd to the same streets: the day works differently for a Premiership Rugby final, where two club supports arrive rather than one national one, and the singing on the walk up is different too, as our piece on Swing Low, Sweet Chariot explains. More rugby writing sits in our rugby section.