Drinking the Devil’s Juice at the Most Disturbing Bar in London
Morbid curiosities, taxidermized animals, and absinthe make for an interesting and disturbing night.
If a serial killer opened a bar, it would probably look something like the Last Tuesday Society in London.
I like off-beat, underground places, and I read about The Last Tuesday Society before my recent trip to the United Kingdom. It’s not the kind of pub you find in Westminster near tourist hotels and Buckingham Palace. And it doesn’t appear in guidebooks or lists of the top 10 places to visit in London.
You have to be into bizarre stuff and go looking for it.
So, an hour after sunset, I left my Airbnb flat in Islington and walked a few blocks to catch the 55 bus towards Walthamstow. I rode about a dozen stops to Hackney, where I hopped from the bus and found myself on a dark block with few people out.
Everything was already closed for the evening, but from across the way, I could see a neon light shining from the window of 11 Mare Street. The facade was like that of a fantasy bookstore or magic shop, some type of underground place you see in the movies where people go to secret meetings or buy illicit products or potions. There were some human skulls and interesting décor in the window, but it was hard to see what was inside.
While most people would be hesitant to go inside, these are just the kind of places I look for when traveling.
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I was happily greeted by a smiling hostess and a bartender. Both were in their thirties and so far, neither appeared to be a serial killer. Reggae music played in the background, and about a dozen people were quietly talking at candlelit tables. While everything seemed relatively normal, the macabre posters and huge collection of taxidermized heads on the walls alluded to something else.
I paid the six-pound entrance fee, grabbed a beer to take along, and entered the dungeon below to find out what puts The Last Tuesday Society on the map.
There’s far more that I found down there than I’d rather describe. After all, I’m not looking to make this Substack a horror show, and I don’t want to throw up any red flags with certain keywords.
On the way down the spiral staircase, you’re greeted by some Wolfman’s head and a two-headed baby. Downstairs, I found the “Cabinets of Death,” which are filled with all sorts of death, disease, torture, and unpleasant parts of the human experience. There are small sections on cannibalism, sexually transmitted diseases, and even medieval dentistry. Stuffed goats are propped up at a table with a pentagram carved into the back of a seat.
It's hard to determine exactly what is real. The decapitated head, hung body, and severed torso with the syphilis-infected male genitalia were most certainly fake. But the taxidermized animals were real, along with the skulls, the jar of human teeth, the bones, and several other items, and the full-sized skeleton encased in the back table. There are many more graphic things that I’d rather not mention.
To top it off, the place stunk with a pungent aroma of old, dust, and death.
In the back, I found a dozen bare breasts on the ceiling. At one point, while enjoying my beer near a stuffed lion, I caught a guy standing on his tippy toes, trying to lick a nipple.
I’m neither a squeamish person nor do I get sick very often. But there was something quite unsettling about the underground museum. I’m not sure if it was the nature of the items or the fact that someone was so enamored with death, bodies, and morbid curiosities that they had dedicated their life and lots of money to this.
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You can find out a bit about the owner, Viktor Wynd, online. His passion for collecting macabre stuff and dead things goes back to at least 1995. He previously ran Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, which had, among other things, a mummified penis from a hanged man. Wynd is also the author of two books and has made several television appearances on the BBC network and a National Geographic documentary.
What was clear was that Wynd takes his craft seriously. It’s not like he dumped a random bunch of things in here for shock value. There’s careful curation at play, making it a legitimate museum. The Last Tuesday Society regularly hosts lectures on odd things and even witchcraft events. The website has a lot of content, too, most of it well-written and with a genuine intent to educate. In an interview with Quest TV, Wynd called the museum an “explosion of the inside of my head.”
Wynd may be a sick puppy, but I also wondered what it says about myself that I was so drawn to the place.
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After having my fill of death and despair, I went back upstairs for a taste of the Devil’s Botany absinthe. The bar is technically a separate business, but it’s really all the same. It’s slightly less grim but still adorned with macabre art and gruesome scenes.
The bar patrons were surprisingly normal. As one might expect in a place like this, there were a couple of goths. But most were just ordinary Millennial Londoners out for a drink and looking to have a laugh among dead animals and morbid collectibles.
I grabbed a table and settled on my drink: a Corpse Reviver #666. It sounded evil enough to take in the full experience but, according to the bartender, made with a light enough dose of absinthe that I’d be able to stand up and leave on my own accord.
God knows this wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to pass out drunk.