Former James Bond star Daniel Craig has become co-owner of a 250-year-old Clerkenwell pub tied to a hangman’s ghost, and jokes he may leave a pint downstairs for the spectre.
Craig, 58, has joined friends as co-owner of The Horseshoe in Clerkenwell, London, a pub described as a quarter-millennium old and carrying cellar lore about a hangman who still lingers. The Daily Mail reported the actor teamed with Soho House owner Nick Jones, Flat Iron steakhouse founder Charlie Carroll, and Justin O’Shea, creative director of Craig’s lager brand Bad Belze.
Retiring landlady Pauline Tucker said the ghost talk did not come up at the sale. The new owners heard about it afterward.
Tucker described the figure tied to the cellar in plain terms.
She said:
"You don’t see him. You feel him."
Craig answered the story with a dry pubman’s fix. Speaking to The Times, he floated a peace offering for the resident he nicknamed Gilbert.
Craig said:
"I don’t know what he drinks but we might have to leave a pint down there: \"Here you are Gilbert\"."
The plan for the building is a refurbishment that keeps the place a proper pub. Craig has said he does not intend to turn The Horseshoe into a modern gastropub.
The purchase tracks a childhood spent around the bar. Craig’s parents and grandparents ran pubs in Cheshire. He has described lock-ins, hard New Year’s Eve parties, and the daily traffic of locals who used the room as a place to talk through ordinary troubles.
Craig said:
"I grew up in pubs. You know the ups and downs of a pub. I know the good and the bad of it."
He added:
"As a kid I’d get to go down and talk to the locals, especially at lunchtime, and it was always about the day, what’s going on. It’s an outlet for people to come and talk about stuff, maybe their problems."
That is the old British pub bargain: a counter, a pint, and room for people to sort the day without a committee. Craig’s group is betting that model still holds in Clerkenwell.
Craig played James Bond in five films from 2006 to 2021. Five years on from his final scenes, the next actor in Ian Fleming’s spy franchise has not been cast. Amazon MGM Studios struck a deal last year with longtime stewards Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson for full control of the series, with casting talk, an autumn announcement window, and a possible start around the turn of the year all still framed in relative terms. Names floated in rumor circles have included Callum Turner, Jack Lowden, Harris Dickinson, Jack Barton, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. None is confirmed.
Craig’s next major screen job is outside the tux. He is set to play the magician Uncle Andrew Ketterley in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.
For now the headline off-screen is bricks, beer, and a cellar story the sellers left for later. A 250-year-old London pub, a hangman’s ghost the landlady says you feel rather than see, and an ex-Bond star who grew up watching how a good house works, and how a bad one fails.
Leave the gastropub small plates to the consultants. A real pub still earns its keep when locals can walk in, order a pint, and talk straight, ghost optional.
