The White Lion has been sold, the first real hope in 14 years for the boarded-up Grade II listed landmark at the foot of Putney Bridge.
Richard Brecker of Brecker Grossmith, the commercial property agency selling it, announced on Friday that the sale of 14-16 Putney High Street had completed, ending a search for a buyer that began in 2023. He called it “a marathon not a sprint” and said he was “mightily relieved”. He did not say who has bought it, what they paid, or what they plan to do with it.
Nicola Grant, executive director of Positively Putney, the business improvement district for the town centre, welcomed the news and said she was excited to hear the new owners’ plans. “This has been an eyesore for far too long,” she wrote.
The Putney Society, the residents’ amenity group, had gone further. It had begun drafting a request for Wandsworth Council to intervene before the building fell down.
That it has been sold at all is a relief. But the new owner faces a huge amount of work, starting with a roof stripped by squatters last year, and any plan will need planning permission and listed building consent from Wandsworth Council. Twice before, approved plans to restore the building came to nothing. Nothing is guaranteed, but there is cause for optimism.
Nearly 400 years of the White Lion
There has been a White Lion on this spot since 1636, first as a coaching inn, then a hotel and a pub. In 1815 a guidebook promised travellers “a good dinner drest here to order”, and reminded them not to forget the stewed eels.
The present building replaced the old inn in 1887: four storeys of red brick and stone in the French style, with caryatids on the front, a slate roof topped with iron cresting and a stone lion above the top-floor window. It was listed in 1983.
Nearly a century after it went up, it was a music venue. Gary Numan played there in 1978, and Historic England records that punk bands, X-Ray Spex among them, played there regularly in the late 1970s and 80s. Then came the chain bars: the Slug and Lettuce, the Litten Tree, Walkabout and finally Wahoo, a sports bar, which closed in May 2012 when its operators went into administration.
The building has been shut ever since. In 2015 Historic England added it to its national register of heritage at risk, and that same year the council approved a plan to bring it back as a pub with 16 hotel rooms, recreating the original period interior from 1930s drawings of the site.
The Putney Society backed the plan. Its members had “long been concerned by the increasing dilapidation” of the building, it wrote, and it welcomed the fact that “despite the obvious temptations the upper floors will be a hotel not flats”. Historic England supported “bringing the Building At Risk into use”.
Members can read what became of the hotel rescue approved in 2015, how squatters got in, and what the floor plans show inside the building today. They can also see the drawings for its future.
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What you can do
Any planning or listed building consent application for 14-16 Putney High Street will appear on Wandsworth Council’s planning applications search, where anyone can read the plans and comment before a decision is made.
Concerns about the condition of the building can be reported to the council’s planning enforcement team.
Some good news at last! The White Lion has been a dismal site for so long that its great that it should now be restored – and used.