From the Historic England entry:
“Late 19th Century. Purpose built hotel at corner of St John’s Hill and Falcon Road. Continuous frontage to both roads. With a total of 9 varied bays wide; 3 storeys plus garret. Red brick with stone enrichments. Ground floor public house facade with stone and granite pilasters. Central entrance on curve of the corner beneath semi-circular fanlight and prominent pediment.
Subsidiary entrances at each end.
Elaborate stone architraves to first and second floor windows. Iron window guards and stone pediments to second floor windows only. Giant pilasters with stylised Corinthian capitals run between first and second floors, supporting heavily bracketed cornice with a panelled brick parapet and stone ball decoration. The 3 entrances are accentuated at roof level by brick gables at each end decorated with stone copings and balls, and in the centre, by a truncated pyramidal roof surrounded by an iron balcony and flagstaff. Prominent chimneys. Internally rich with cut brilliant glass behind the bar display and in partitions between the bars. Leaded lights to the draught lobby, original mirrors and full-storey cast iron columns with stylised Corinthian capitals.”
From pubheritage.Camra.org.uk:
“A splendid, showy pub of 1887, handily placed for Clapham Junction station. The interior is extraordinary and its island servery and very tall back fitting (complete with office in the middle)
has the longest counter in Britain measured at the circumference.
This was originally just over 125ft, exceeding the famous long counter at the Horse Shoe Bar, Glasgow, which weighs in at just over 104ft. A rather tasteless and wider counter top added in 2014 at the rear has extended the circumference even more.
Much of the original arrangements survive. At the corner is a large public bar (originally with partitions) and at the rear a luxuriously panelled room (pity about the garish modern glass in the skylights).
On the left-hand side is a snug enclosed by a glazed screen.
Adjacent is a lobby where the original glass has portrayals of the eponymous falcon and the words ‘private bar’.
The most interesting glass is in the rear room, showing the pub in its humble predecessor states and its grander, present manifestation. You can see funeral corteges stopping off at ‘Death’s Door’, the nickname for the pub when the landlord was a Mr Death!”
Julia Upton 