Ruskin Arms

The Story

This East End pub was Iron Maiden's home in the early years of the NWOBHM. The band played on a tiny stage practically on top of the audience, with bands making do with a single lamp hanging from the ceiling. Iron Maiden debuted here in 1978, playing 25 times over the next three years. The pub was previously owned by the family of original Small Faces keyboardist Jimmy Winston, who played there with his own band when Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane invited him to join the group that would become the Small Faces, whose first show was precisely at the Ruskin, in 1965. The Ruskin Arms is immortalized in Derek Riggs' artwork on the cover of Killers and on the back cover of Somewhere in Time, where the "Ruskin" sign appears. It definitively closed between 2018 and 2019, after decades of coming and going between renovations and re-openings.

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