New Italian owners turn the lights back on at Angel and Crown pub revealing a bold new theme
The Angel and Crown pub has been reborn as a vibrant, 70s-themed ‘Funky Pub’, marking a bold new chapter in the pub’s interative journey of re-invention since it was closed in 2017 after years of complaints.
The stretch between St Barnabas Church and Globe Town is probably the darkest on Roman Road. Once the sun has gone down and Peckovers butcher has closed for the day – the only shops left to light up this portion of the street are a couple of unassuming off-licences and a fish and chips shop.
Just a few feet away, on the corner of Roman Road and Smart Street, stands the Angel and Crown – a long-standing pub whose main claim to fame was for being the worst in London. In recent years, however, something has shifted.
After multiple changes of ownership and a turbulent history of anti-social behaviour, the venue shut its doors in 2017. According to one resident quoted in an official council document, neighbours regularly witnessed ‘nitrous oxide being inhaled, cannabis being smoked and powder being snorted on the back of hands outside the pub in broad daylight’ while passersby were often ‘verbally and physically abused by customers from the pub’.
It reopened in late 2020 under the leadership of chartered accountant turned landlady Mel Keogh, who started the arduous process of restoring the premises and the pub’s image. Mel’s efforts were impressive and well-received by the community but her momentum was halted by two consecutive lockdowns and an increasingly unfavourable economy for pubs, forcing her to sell the business in 2023.
Earlier this year, however, Italian immigrants Claudio Miccio and Daniele Paduano got the keys to the place.
‘We realised there was potential in the area, because the location is on the main road, on a corner, but the feeling we had was that the area missed a bit of spark,’ Claudio says.
Then came the idea for the Funky Pub theme and the 1970s design. The two dropped all pretence of subtlety, leaning into a playful, almost exaggerated interpretation of the era and installing psychedelic patterned wallpaper, neon angel wings and flower power prints.
Claudio moved to London from Pompei in 2011 to study marketing at Queen Mary University. After starting a career helping businesses achieve a digital presence, he joined forces with Daniele to start a property business, which was badly hit by the COVID pandemic, prompting them to move into hospitality and launch a pizza restaurant in Stratford.
Through this new business venture, Claudio and Daniele hope to drown out old rumours and cover up the pub’s dark past, using vintage songs and bright orange paint to finish the job: ‘When we were running the property business, we were driving around most of the day, and we would constantly listen to 70s music on the radio.
‘We really liked the music of that age but we also realised that, if there was so much of it on the radio, then there must be a market for it,’ Claudio explains.
The pair say they only really became aware of the pub’s prior history after they took over the business.
‘I’m not sure if this would have affected our choice of taking the place, but it was clear that something was going on, because the place was really run down, and it looked really dark,’ Claudio continues.
By the late 2000s, the Angel and Crown had built a reputation as one of the roughest pubs in the area.
Former visitors remember it as a classic London boozer gone bad. ‘If you were a newcomer off the street, and if you weren’t classically, sort of like from around the area, and know the people, it would be an intimidating pub. It was rowdy. It was loud,’ recalls John, a local boxer who visited the pub in all its different iterations.
‘Lots of the people were very good, but they would drink too much, and things would escalate.’
For years, the Angel and Crown remained defiant in its identity, refusing to appeal to the new crowd of hip outsiders that slowly started colonising this end of the E3 postcode.
‘If you were a new person coming off the street, or two single ladies, I don’t think you’d feel comfortable,’ John continues, recalling instances of excessive drinking, fighting and even an episode where a person had to be tasered by police officers.
The lore around the venue became progressively louder and darker. The London press didn’t hesitate; before the decade was out, the pub was declared the worst in London.
The increasing volume of complaints prompted Tower Hamlets council to review the pub’s licence and, following several restrictions imposed on him, former landlord Stephen Baldwin sold the pub in 2017 because he ‘couldn’t be bothered anymore’.
That’s when Mel Keogh came in, working tirelessly alongside her father to clean up the pub’s act before reopening it in 2019. Channelling her love for the community, she transformed the venue while keeping the tradition alive, preserving many of the original features.
‘I think it was quite intimidating…but I think pubs should be the complete opposite of that. They should be a welcoming place for people’, she told The Slice at the time.
She sold the business in 2023, but her legacy has been long-lasting: ‘Mel did a great job. But change can’t happen overnight. She changed the pub dramatically, and actually it was probably slightly harder for her,’ explains John.
When Claudio and Daniele took over last February, they decided to build on Mel’s legacy and continue her mission to turn it into a bright and inclusive local pub for an underserved community. The venue came back with the same name but a different tagline: The Funky Pub.
‘The changes that you can see outside and inside are so significant that everyone can notice something has changed from the outset. This has made us feel really proud,’ Claudio says, speaking perfect English in a thick Italian accent. He moves comfortably around the bar, striking up a conversation with two customers visiting the pub for the first time, confidently fielding questions on the pub’s beer offering.
The dark facade is now gone, there are no worn carpets or old-school signage. Some of the classic English boozer features have been preserved, but in the process of sanitising the pub’s image, a lot of the original East Ender charm has inevitably been lost.
So the question remains: are places like the new Angel and Crown an essential step towards the economic regeneration of the area or are they inadvertently contributing to the loss of identity of the East End?
‘A lot of the original East Enders, they’re thinning out with less and less of them, like this pub here, 20 years ago would not have worked. A lot of the older standards are getting older and dying off, or moving out to Essex,’ John explains.
Claudio – once a Roman Road resident – is well aware of the optics, and refuses to be seen as an outsider contributing to the erasure of the original identity of the area: ‘One of the first decisions we made was to keep the original name, and this was a way for us to respect the local heritage. But at the same time, we felt a significant change was needed.’
In an economy that is increasingly hostile to pubs and in an area where a vast number of residents do not consume alcohol for religious reasons, Claudio is not blind to the scale of the challenge:
‘Pubs nowadays need to be more creative than in the past. Now you need something extra, something additional to bring people in, whether it is a pride event, or a Halloween party, a comedy show, or a magic show, you just need to give people a reason to come to the pub which is not strictly related to alcohol.’
Through their ambitious reinvention, Claudio and Daniele hope that the quirky spirit of the new Angel and Crown will appeal to a new generation of visitors. The journey ahead is still long but for now, they managed to cast off its former dark aura and finally turned the lights back on on this corner of Roman Road.
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E2, not E3. And Strictly Fresh, directly opposite, is clearly rather more than an “unassuming off licence”. Other than that, nice piece – I wish them luck.