Bleak days for Dickens' old pub

Bleak House would be a more suitable name for the 300-year-old Ship and Lobster pub, as plans have been announced for its imminent closure.

It is the worst of times for regulars at the pub - featured in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations under the pseudonym The Three Jolly Bargemen - as the Port of London Authority is selling the area on the bank of the Thames at Denton Wharf in Gravesend.

The pub, which no doubt helped inspire such notorious Dickensian characters as The Tale of Two Cities hero Sidney Carton and Mr Bumble and Mrs Mann in Oliver Twist, was regularly visited by the writer on his numerous walks around the family home at Gads Hill Place.

With his aptly Dickensian name, Peter Fagan has set up the "Save Our Ship and Lobster" campaign.

Mr Fagan, a 33-year-old marketing consultant, says: "My father and grandfather drank in this pub - it's part of my inheritance.

"This is a real pub, with real history. John Constable came here in the 1820s for a drink before travelling on to draw Chalk Church and it was the last public engagement of Labour leader John Smith before he died.

"We all want the pub to stay open, because we don't want to end up drinking in a McPub, where there's no music and you can't smoke at the bar."

The pub first began serving travellers on their way to London in the 1700s, offering them pints and its renowned sausage-and-Stilton sandwiches as they alighted from the London ferry.

As the first pub on the river, it rapidly became a favourite haunt of the most notorious smugglers of the time, and contraband of all sorts would change hands as the ale flowed and pipes were lit.

Mr Fagan says: "The pub is an integral part of this community, and many people would be left very lonely if it disappeared.

"With its bankside location, seamen from all over the world - including Russia, Vietnam, Japan and China - have enjoyed a pint or two down here, as they have done throughout the centuries. It would be a real shame if that tradition came to an end."

Despite pleas from the local council, who are looking at the possibility of making the pub a listed building, the whole area of Denton Wharf is due to go on the market this month.