Best Restaurants, Bars and Things to Do in Clapham, London

About Clapham

Clapham has a food and drink scene shaped by a large, young professional residential population that eats out often and knows what it wants. The result is a neighbourhood with a high concentration of reliable restaurants, wine bars and all-day cafes — not many of them exceptional, but very few of them bad, and enough range to make the area a genuinely good place to live if you care about eating well.

Clapham Old Town is the part of the neighbourhood worth knowing if you are coming from elsewhere. The streets around the Parish Church and The Pavement have a character that the High Street lacks — independent restaurants and wine bars that serve a local clientele in rooms that feel like they belong to the neighbourhood. The food quality here is consistently higher than the High Street and the atmosphere is better for a longer meal.

Lets Discover creators who cover Clapham know the area well enough to steer you away from the obvious and toward the places that actually reward a visit.

Clapham High Street is the busiest part of the neighbourhood for eating and drinking and contains everything from reliable group restaurants and cocktail bars to the occasional independent worth finding. The real quality, however, is concentrated in the streets around Clapham Old Town — The Pavement, Clapham Park Road and the blocks between the Parish Church and Clapham Common station have an excellent set of independent restaurants, wine bars and gastropubs that are significantly better than the High Street average. Abbeville Road in the Clapham South end of the neighbourhood has developed its own strong cluster of neighbourhood cafes and restaurants that serve the residential streets around it. Clapham Common itself has a changing roster of outdoor food and drink options in good weather, and the Long Road and Old Town junction area has some of the neighbourhood's better all-day cafes.

History and culture in Clapham

Clapham's development as a prosperous south London suburb began in earnest in the 17th and 18th centuries, when wealthy Londoners built substantial houses on the edges of Clapham Common to escape the city while remaining close enough for regular visits. The Common itself — one of the largest areas of open land in inner south London — has been a defining feature of the neighbourhood since the medieval period and was the site of one of the first meetings of the Clapham Sect, the 18th-century evangelical Christian movement that campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade. William Wilberforce and other Clapham Sect members lived in houses on the edge of the Common, and their efforts contributed directly to the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The railway arrived at Clapham in the mid-19th century and transformed the neighbourhood into a commuter suburb, replacing the Georgian villas with Victorian terraces and the population that filled them. Clapham Junction, technically in Battersea but closely associated with Clapham, became one of the busiest railway junctions in the world.