A plaque on the pub wall states 'Ceylon Place - New East Greenwich - 1801'. The Pilot was then a rather more down to earth Whitbread pub, and has I think been subject to two makeovers since. It gets its name not from any connection with the riverside and the causeway at the end of River Way, the street the pub is on - and it seems probable that this ever got called the 'pilot's causeway' only because it was close to The Pilot inn.
 
'The Pilot' was William Pitt the Younger, who resigned as Prime Minister in 1801 and was commemorated in a song written for a banquet on his brithday the following year by Geroge Canning for a banquet in honour of Pitt's birthday on 28 May 28 1802.
 
It's first verse (from the Victorian Web) is:

and it is perhaps not surprising that Canning used the pseudonym Claude Sprott Esq.
 
As an article reproduced on the Greenwich Industrial History site notes, the 1801 lease on the site was to Pitt, his brother and other family members and the song was partly to celebrate that the Dutch had ceded their part of Ceylon to Britain in 1802.
 
Five of the cottages in Ceylon are bricked up in my picture, presumably to prevent squatting. They now have been tidied up and are occupied. The pub is now a Fuller's pub offering "a seasonal menu, our beers and fabulous boutique accommodation" and on my only recent visit I hated it.