Beer and architecture experts Geoff Brandwood and Jane Jephcote have identified London's most important historic pub interiors. They are a hugely varied collection ranging from lavishly decorated late Victorian hostelries to simple, street-corner locals.

All the pubs below have interiors that survive from before the great wave of refitting that began in the 1960s and which transformed the character of the vasy majority of pubs in Britain. Their book, London Heritage Pubs: An Inside Story, contains 156 entries out of a possible 5,500 pubs in the capital's 33 boroughs.

Another guide due out in October picks a bizarre local boozer in New Cross, south-east London as the best pub in Britain.

According to the Rough Pub Guide: a Celebration of the Great British Boozer by Robin Turner and Paul Moody the Montague Arms, which has a human skeleton on the bar and an embalmed zebra in a horse-drawn carriage, is top of the list of genuine pubs we can't afford to lose.

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Other London pubs in the book's top 50 include The Foundry in Shoreditch, The Green Man in Harrods, the Palm Tree in Bow and The Charlie Chaplin in Elephant and Castle.

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PRINCESS LOUISE, HOLBORN

This pub has a fantastic interior from the late-Victorian golden age of pub building. What makes it even more special is, paradoxically, modern: the reinstallation of the screens that used to divide it up into small drinking compartments. Just the sort of thing our ancestors loved.

Mine's a pint: Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Bitter 4 per cent. A malty bitter brewed at Yorkshire's oldest brewery (founded in 1758) and still served from wooden casks.

CITTIE OF YORKE, HOLBORN

Go to the rear bar. You might be forgiven for thinking you are in a centuries-old mighty Tudor hall. But what surrounds you was created as a piece of nostalgia in the 1920s. The great vats are a reminder of the former owners, George Henekey & Company.

Mine's a pint: Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Bitter 4 per cent.

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