Last modified: 9 November 2026 · Build 1
See also: The Surrey Tavern · The County Arms
Working notes, not for publication as they stand. Points still to be checked are marked [?].
The Wheatsheaf is at 2 Upper Tooting Road, on the corner of Trinity Road (A214) and Upper Tooting Road (A24), directly opposite Tooting Bec Underground station. It sits exactly where the journey up Trinity Road begins.
The main road in front of the pub is Stane Street. Balham Hill, Balham High Road and Upper Tooting Road all follow the line of the Roman road from Londinium (London) to Noviomagus Reginorum (Chichester), which is now the A24.
Noviomagus is Celtic in origin and means roughly “new field” or “new market”; Reginorum means “of the Regni”, the local tribe.
The road was built very early in the Roman occupation and was certainly in use by AD 60–70. So the Wheatsheaf stands on a route nearly two thousand years old, and Trinity Road branches off it.
It is much older than the present building.
In 1802 a mare was stopped “in the lane leading to the Wheat Sheaf, at Tooting” (Chronicles, July 2022). For a time, then, the southern end of the road was simply the way to the pub, which gives us one of its early names, Wheatsheaf Lane.
The Wheatsheaf was also the landmark for the velocipede race of April 1869 (Chronicles, April 2022).
CAMRA describes it as “a spacious, late Victorian pub on a prominent corner site at Tooting Bec crossroads”. Louise Murphy’s draft says it was rebuilt in 1892 [?].
Its neighbour along the road, the King’s Head (84 Upper Tooting Road, Grade II), carries the inscription “Rebuilt 1896”. Both pubs were probably rebuilt in the same 1890s boom, when the old village of Tooting Bec was turning into a suburb.
Still to settle: the exact date of the rebuilding, from The Building News, the brewery’s records, or a date on the building itself [?].
I found no direct evidence yet that coaches or horse buses stopped at the Wheatsheaf, though a big corner inn on a main road out of London very likely served as one [?].
The road became a tram route when the London County Council opened its first electric line, from Westminster to Tooting, in 1903 [date and route to check].
The tube station opposite opened on 13 September 1926 as “Trinity Road (Tooting Bec)” and was renamed Tooting Bec on 1 October 1950: a good cameo for the talk.
The Antic pub group took it over in 2011 and gave it a makeover. It is now run by Urban Pubs & Bars.
An inn on the Roman road to Chichester since at least 1737, which gave Trinity Road one of its first names, Wheatsheaf Lane, and was rebuilt as a late-Victorian landmark in the 1890s.