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.

Top 10 beers at the Great British Beer Festival

Beer expert Melissa Cole picks ten of the best brews in Britain

A girls' guide to beer

Katherine Adams discovers the feminine side to beer as she battles big-bellied lager and ale lovers at this week's Great British Beer Festival

• Britain's 10 best pubs with gardens

• Britain's 'best' tap water

Make mine a pint: the summer's best beers and ciders

For all the trumpeting of English wine, beer and cider are Britain’s finest drinks

• Star buys: May 31

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.

Top 10 heritage pubs in London

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.

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies