by David Long
The previous record, held by Dubai’s Skyview Bar at the Burj Al Arab Hotel, would have set you back a paltry £3,766.52.
Hot or cold, at its best pub food is still simple, but that can mean good and affordable, often significantly more affordable than the mass of plasticky, portion-controlled fast-food and franchised outlets to which visitors frequently have to resort if they are looking for good value. Quality varies, clearly, but the dread days of margarine and stale, mousetrap cheese are now all but gone and, in central London, real cooking rarely comes cheaper than this. Just as importantly, only a very few restaurants (and positively no chains) can match the fascinating histories and evocative atmosphere of these ancient hostelries and alehouses.
Any sense of romance makes it hard not to reflect, as you take your seat in the Chop House at the back of Fleet Street’s remarkable and quite unspoilt Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, that Dickens himself once did as you do now before writing it up in his Tale of Two Cities. And Thameside pubs such as the old Anchor Bankside and the famous Prospect of Whitby command fantastic panoramic views across the Thames. The Anchor was used by both Pepys and Samuel Johnson, himself a friend of the Thrales who at that time owned the brewery next door. The Prospect of Whitby, once a popular hangout of river pirates and smugglers, was likewise a favourite watering hole of the notorious hanging judge, George Jeffreys, a notable imbiber.
These historical associations run deep. Further east in Rotherhithe, the Mayflower for years held a unique licence to sell British and American postage stamps thanks to its long ties with the former colony whose Pilgrim Fathers set off from the pub’s back steps. Similarly, despite (or perhaps because of) its proximity to the House of Commons, Whitehall’s Silver Cross is still licensed as a brothel because no one has seen fit to revoke the licence granted by Charles I. And Mayfair’s strangely named ‘I Am the Only Running Footman’ was formerly the Running Horse, but was changed in the 1770s by its owner, the 4th Duke of Queensbury, in honour of his own manservant who was said to be able to keep up a respectable 8 mph.
DRINKS WITH SOLID ORIGINS
Champagne
The French would have you believe the drink was the creation of a Benedictine monk, and it is true that from the 1670s onwards the much-storied Dom Perignon made some significant contributions to the refermenting process that gives Champagne its sparkle.
But while he was still a young novitiate, Christopher Merret back in England had already demonstrated the process and, as long ago as 1662, had described it in a paper called Some Observations Concerning the Ordering of Wines, which he presented to a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College in Bishopsgate. (At around the same time, it was also English ingenuity, in the person of Admiral Sir Robert Mansell, which devised the means of constructing glass bottles strong enough to withstand the pressure resulting from so many bubbles.)
Buck’s Fizz
A refreshing mix of Champagne and orange juice (with an optional dash of grenadine), this popular wedding cocktail and breakfast tipple is thought to have been devised by the barman at the Mayfair club of the same name. (In the early days of motoring, the Royal Automobile Club also had its own cocktail, Fred Fraeck’s 1914 R.A.C., but with unfortunate associations of drink-driving this gin-and-vermouth mix is now less well known.)
John Collins
Somewhat edged out by the American Tom Collins, the original was created in the early nineteenth century by the eponymous barman at Limmer’s Hotel on the corner of Conduit Street and St George Street. His base was ‘genièvre’ or London Dry gin, but, in the years since, the drink has spawned a family of regional variations including a Sandy Collins (whisky), a Pierre Collins (cognac) and a rum-based Pedro Collins.
Predating almost all of London’s ancient alehouses, though, is the venerable Hoop and Grapes in Aldgate, said to have origins dating back to the 1200s. It is also reputed to have a tunnel (now lost or maybe blocked) leading to the Tower.
As early as 1390, there was a Boar’s Head on Eastcheap in the City (sadly, this was demolished in 1831); and The Guinea Grill just off New Bond Street is known to have first served a brew back in 1423.
But, generally, the best of the really old London pubs are those of the seventeenth century, like the aforementioned Cheshire Cheese, the George on Borough High Street and the Lamb & Flag in Covent Garden, each characterised by old varnish and creaking joists, pleasantly blackened, panelled walls, often open fires in winter and bare floorboards. Invariably dark and somewhat stark, but cosy with it, they have an ambience that positively reeks of old pewter mugs, serving wenches and navy press gangs.
They have stories to tell, too, and often of storytellers. The Lamb & Flag, for example, was for years better known as The Bucket of Blood, so ferocious were the many prize-fights staged on the premises. (In 1679, when poet laureates still frequented pubs, John Dryden was attacked and beaten here after writing scurrilous lines about the Duchess of Portsmouth, Charles II’s mistress.) The George, London’s last surviving galleried inn and now in the care of the National Trust, was similarly known to Shakespeare and, in the summer, strolling players still perform his works in the charming courtyard outside.
GINTERLUDE – MOTHER’S RUIN
The name ‘gin’ derives from Geneva (itself a corruption of the old French, ‘genièvre’, meaning juniper) but the drink’s earliest origins are to be found in the Netherlands where the Dutch first distilled grain and flavoured it lightly with piquant juniper berries and other botanicals. The English – and Londoners in particular – developed a taste for the resulting liquor early on, with its popularity being further encouraged around 1690 by soldiers returning home from the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns.
It is most famous, of course, as the fabled ‘Mother’s Ruin’ of times past – two of William Hogarth’s best-loved engravings contrast the cheerfully bucolic scenes of innocuous Beer Street with the seedy, ruinous degradation of sinister Gin Lane. The drink’s popularity among the capital’s drinking classes owed much to its low price, the result of some ill-considered laws introduced by William of Orange in a bid to discourage the buying of imported spirits.
With gin, it was said at the time, one could get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for two. The stuff was soon unlicensed, rarely taxed and on sale everywhere, from barbers’ shops to street barrows. With more than 15,000 outlets in total, including an estimated one in seven private houses in the East End, Londoners soon had plenty of opportunities to avail themselves. Unsurprisingly, annual consumption rose rapidly in the 1730s, doubling in quantity to 6½ million gallons in less than a decade. Suspecting that drinking on this scale encouraged not just drunkenness but also idleness and vice ‘in the inferior sort of people’, Parliament eventually moved to raise the duty payable with a new Gin Act in 1751.
It took almost a century for the drink’s image to recover, even so. With the Royal Navy carrying Angostura bitters as a preventive medicine on its voyages around the Empire, ships’ officers quickly recognised that, by using the medicine as a sophisticated mixer, the resulting pink gin or ‘pinkers’ made a nice change from standard-issue naval grog or rum.
Colonial hands in the Indian subcontinent were meanwhile making discoveries of their own, namely that tonic water containing quinine – widely prescribed as a measure against malaria – went rather well with it, too. Before long, the idea of drinking gin and tonic had travelled back home and, once again, it caught on immediately.
Despite this somewhat chequered history, London or Dry Gin has long maintained a reputation for particular quality. The aptly named Beefeater is the last of the big names actually to produce gin in the capital, however, from its distillery close to Kennington Oval.
Other pubs have a more gruesome tale to tell, however, such as the Grenadier in Wilton Row just off Belgrave Square. With its distinctive kerbside sentry box and martial decorations, it is believed by many to be haunted by the ghost of a young guards officer who was caught cheating at cards and summarily flogged to de
ath in the cellar by his fellow subalterns.
The story could just be a colourful local legend, of course, but the Blind Beggar in the East End is definitely the place where Ronnie Kray shot dead a rival gang member called George Cornell. (The year was 1966 and the jukebox was playing ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ by the Walker Brothers.) Similarly, it is well documented that the Anglesea Arms in South Kensington was chosen by Bruce Reynolds for a preliminary meeting to discuss the feasibility of mounting what was to become the Great Train Robbery.
Perhaps the most touching of these old pub yarns, however, is that of the Widow’s Son in Bow where, once a year, a sailor ceremonially hangs a hot cross bun over the bar in a ritual dating back more than two centuries. In so doing, he commemorates a real widow who, expecting her sailor son home for Easter, kept a warm bun for him. Sadly, he never returned, but each year until her death she added another bun to the mouldering, blackened bundle hanging above the bar, the same bundle that is preserved and honoured today by the locals in this perfect example of a traditional, early Victorian East End pub.
Less believable, perhaps, is the suggestion that Dr Johnson wrote sections of his famous dictionary while seated in the Cheshire Cheese. Certainly, Boswell refuses to confirm it but it is an enduring myth and, sitting in its characterful gloom with sawdust still on the floor, it is easy to imagine the good doctor (whose house is in nearby Gough Square) mulling over the perfect definition. Its entrance hidden away in Wine Office Court, a narrow alleyway off Fleet Street where once the city’s wine sellers came to obtain their warrants to trade, the present pub has long been a favourite of writers and journalists. It rose from the ashes of the Great Fire only as recently as 1667, but the cellars are much older and incorporate part of the undercroft of a 600-year-old Carmelite monastery. So, too, is the front step, now worn thin by hundreds of years and thousands of feet and so protected by an iron grille.
Sitting astride a busy junction of road, river and rail a little further to the west, there is little on the approach to prepare one for the strange and wonderful wedge-shaped Black Friar. Outside stands a statue of a jolly monk, set above a mosaic and beaming down on passers-by; inside, it is a veritable riot of Art Nouveau with creamy, rich-veined marble walls and archways, hand-beaten Arts and Crafts copper murals depicting more jolly friars enjoying themselves, gleaming gold leaf on the ceiling, inglenooks and open fireplaces with burnished brass firedogs and everywhere strange admonishing slogans and bon mots preserved in the stonework: ‘Finery is Foolery’ – ‘Haste is Slow’ – ‘A Good Thing is Soon Snatched Up’. It is all quite delightful.
In the 1960s, a group of speculators wished to pull the old place down so they could develop the site, but the public outcry (led by another poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman) was enormous and, thankfully, today a preservation order has secured the Black Friar for all of us. That such a special place could have been lost seems incredible now, for with its decor as golden and as grand in its way as the Ritz, it is a unique adornment to the area.
At the Red Lion in Duke of York Street, this seventeenth-century simplicity gives way to the nineteenth century’s taste for over-decoration in a diminutive but charming and utterly authentic example of a classic Victorian gin palace. Its lush, plush pub interior is the best in St James’s, with elaborately carved and deeply polished mahogany, etched glass panels and gleaming cut-glass mirrors, and a genuine ‘Lincrusta’ or embossed decorated paper ceiling. Most obviously, it imparts to this rare period survivor precisely the sort of atmosphere a thousand ‘repro-Victoriana’ pubs have signally failed to capture, and on a more intimate scale than the more famous Princess Louise, another period gem so admired for its high Victorian style that even the urinals have been listed by English Heritage as worthy of preservation.
Sadly, many London pubs have disappeared in recent years – at the time of writing, the current loss is reckoned to be as many as six a week – but the best look likely to survive. Few these days are mere boozers – a vulgar derivation of the Middle-English ‘bousen’, incidentally, thieves’ slang for drinking to excess – and the best are perfect capsules of London life: as individual and as characterful as their customers, and as historic as any of London’s great attractions.
Where to Find Them – Britain’s Best Pub Crawl
The Anchor Bankside, Park Street, Southwark, SE1
The Anglesea Arms, Selwood Terrace, SW7
The Black Friar, Queen Victoria Street, EC4
The Blind Beggar, Whitechapel Road, E1
The French House, Dean Street, W1
The George Inn, Borough High Street, SE1
Glassy Junction, South Road, Southall, UB1
The Grenadier, Wilton Row, Belgravia, SW1
I Am the Only Running Footman, Charles Street, Mayfair, W1
The Lamb & Flag, Rose Street, Covent Garden, WC2
The Mayflower, Rotherhithe Street, SE16
The Princess Louise, High Holborn, WC1
The Prospect of Whitby, Wapping Wall, E1
The Red Lion, Duke of York Street, St James’s, W1
The Widow’s Son, Devons Road, E3
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Fleet Street, EC4
Zeitgeist, Black Prince Road, SE11
LONDON’S OLDEST BOOZER?
Often debated – something that is best done over a pint – perhaps the best that can be said is that more than a few London pubs can trace their origins (if not what remains of their architecture) back to 1500 and beyond. Some we’ve already heard about, and here are a few more in no particular order:
The White Hart, Drury Lane, WC2
With ‘roots’ in 1216, the White Hart claims to be the ‘oldest licensed premises in London’ and numbers Dick Turpin among its erstwhile regulars. (Turpin was born in a pub, of course, as his dad had one out at Hempstead in Essex.)
The Red Lion, Whitehall, SW1
The Prime Minister’s local has been the closest pub to Downing Street for years, but predates the street (which was laid out in the 1680s) by a good 250 years. Occasionally, PMs are snapped with a pint in hand, an attempt to appear like they’re one of the lads, but rarely this close to home. (A working facsimile of the pub is also rumoured to have been installed in a secret Cold War-era government bunker in Wiltshire, somewhere for civil servants to relax during the Third World War, but this has not proved possible to verify.)
The Cittie of Yorke, High Holborn, WC1
A pub has been on this site since around 1430 and, although the present building is Grade II-listed, the Tudor façade is decidedly faux and dates from no earlier than the 1920s.
Prospect of Whitby, Wapping Wall, E1
With early sixteenth-century origins, the aforementioned Prospect claims to be the oldest surviving riverside tavern and takes its name from a vessel that frequently tied up outside. Artists such as Whistler and Turner painted views from the tavern, and Londoners came here en route to see pirates hanged at Execution Dock. But the building iteslf is certainly not that old, as the original was almost entirely destroyed in a nineteenth-century fire.
Ye Olde Mitre, Ely Place, EC1
The hardest pub to find in London traces its history back to 1546 when it was built by the Bishop of Ely for his servants. It is popularly but erroneously said to be in Cambridgeshire, not London, because the bishops had their palace nearby and claimed the land for themselves.
The Grapes, Narrow Street, E14
Established no later than 1583, and a rare Blitz survivor, Narrow Street also avoided being swept away during the docklands developments of the 1980s and the pub now offers one of the best views of the river. It is owned by actor Sir Ian McKellen and a couple of chums.
The Seven Stars, Carey Street, WC2
Popular with lawyers as well as tourists – the Inns of Court are nearby, as well as the Royal Courts – the lovely Seven Stars celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2002.
The George Inn Yard, Borough High Street, SE1
Famously the last gallerie
d coaching inn in London, and now part of the National Trust. Rebuilt in 1667, and still highly atmospheric, it has part of the old stabling yard remaining and occasionally Shakespeare’s plays are performed outside.
The Old Bell Tavern, Fleet Street, EC4
Supposedly built by Sir Christopher Wren for masons working on the nearby St Bride’s church, the building itself is at least 300 years old, although the likelihood is that pre-Fire another tavern occupied the same site.
The Lamb, Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1
Built in the 1720s, the pub takes its name from philanthropist William Lamb who provided a conduit to supply the area with relatively clean, fresh water. Its delightful interior, unique in London, features etched glass ‘snob screens’ to enable guilt-ridden drinkers to remain out of sight, and it boasts what is almost certainly London’s oldest working jukebox.
15
Private London
‘When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.’
Bette Midler
Who Owns London?
In one sense we all do – it’s an authentic world city, and most of us who have lived far enough inside the M25 at some point conceive a sense of ownership. But in another, more legitimate, sense, great swathes of London are still privately owned. Admittedly, some of the largest landlords – such as the Crown Estate and the Church Commissioners – may appear to be public bodies. But even if they were (which they are not), aristocratic and family trusts still own and control a far greater proportion of what remains the most valuable land, not just in Britain, but anywhere on the planet.
A tradition of inheritance rather than sale means the precise extent of these private fiefdoms is hard if not impossible to determine, and values can only be guessed at, with prime London real estate costing as much as £100 million an acre, and rising year on year. The real surprise, perhaps, is how durable these estates have proved to be, with the names most associated with a dozen of the more valuable ones shown below underlining how nearly all of them date back literally hundreds of years. In fact, only one estate of any real size in London, centred on Soho, has been established within living memory.