Tommy Flynn’s

Terrible! Me and my family went for drinks and I just wanted tap water because I didn’t feel like drinking but not only the lady at the bar was rude but they refused to serve me tap water so I had to buy a bottled water!

In my opinion, this is the greatest pub in the area.
They have a huge selection of ales, and I can’t decide which to drink each time, so I end up combining a few.
The staff are impressively patient and always ready to call a taxi for you, if you are too drunk to do so for yourself. It is open all week, but the best time to visit this place are Saturday and Sunday nights, even though it can get a bit crowded.

This is a very disappointing pub, it was formerly the Sheepwalk which was a love/​hate bar on Leytonstone’s high street. Over a year ago that closed down, and was reopened with different owners as The Crown.
The Crown was apparently the name of the original pub on this spot, which follows the current trend which I quite like of pubs reverting back to their original names — suggesting an emphasis on valuing the character and history of a pub. However it didn’t take off as the Crown, and it’s now been rebranded as an Irish theme pub (which is totally unnecessary as there’s already an O’Niell’s up the road). Little has changed except, well, for it having an Irish theme.
Unfortunately though, this change to the Irish theme pub hasn’t addressed the actual problems with the Crown, which were mainly that it was trying to be too many things all at once and doing all of them badly, rather than focusing on what it could be good at.
It served reasonably priced, reasonable quality food, sitting somewhere between the pricey good quality of the Red Lion down the road, and the cheap lower quality of the Wetherspoon’s food up the road. That was great, except that you could sit down, order your food, and then find the lights go down and a huge screen starts showing a football match. Suddenly you can’t see your food, and you’re in the middle of a crowd of blokes cheering at the screen. So what is it, a sports bar or a gastro pub?
Alternatively a singer could suddenly start chiming away at volume in the corner of the room, or even worse one of the drunk blokes at the bar could start up instead. Many pubs serve food, show sport, and have musicians and balance it all fine, but somehow this place couldn’t organise it properly, instead creating a messy unpleasant disaster.
What I think is the big achilles heel in the place is that the pub is quite large, but was turned into one big area rather than split into sections which there was easily room for. This means that when sport is on it’s on in the whole pub, and when a singer starts they are singing to everyone in the pub. Why not have designed it with different sections so that different events can be held/​shown in them?
Another thing that doesn’t help is that the pub is often pretty much empty except for a line of blokes at the bar, which is fine in a locals’ pub, but in a large pub like this it feels very unwelcoming.
The transition from the Crown to the Irish pub hasn’t changed any of the above issues. The sad thing is that Leytonstone could really do with a mid range gastro pub, somewhere less of an impact on the wallet than the Red Lion but slightly classier than the Wetherspoon’s. This pub certainly could have been it, but is way off the mark. With any luck it’ll shut down soon and get taken over by new owners with a better vision for its potential.

This pub is a local hero. Even on the most drunken Friday night it is friendly and lots of fun. Open to 2am on weekends.

Sheepwalk located in Leytonstone is just a few minutes walk from the station and on certain nights has Karaōke or even a live band.
They also show sporting events.
I really like the sheepwalk, it has a good atmosphere especially when there is a band playing and it attracts people of all ages both young and old.
They also have a roulette machine and fruit machine for the gambler to indulge in. There is a Pool table and they also started serving food again recently, the food being quite good.
A good pub and I would recommend visiting when there is a band playing.
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