Ancient Pubs of London Pub Crawl | ADHD Social | Everyone Welcome

Six Hundred Years, Five Pubs, One Mile

An afternoon walk through the oldest drinking rooms in London One has been pouring beer on the same spot since 1430. Another was built by a bishop in 1546 and is hidden down an alley so well that people walk past it for years. A third opened in 1602, watched the Great Fire take most of the city in 1666, and is still open on a Tuesday. We're walking between them on a Saturday afternoon.

The route, in the order we walk it

The Princess Louise, High Holborn. Built 1891.

The finest surviving Victorian pub interior in London, and we are starting with it because there is no sensible argument for saving it. The bar is carved up by etched glass and dark carved wood into a series of separate stalls, each one a small private room with its own bit of counter. It looks like a set of extremely ornate confessionals that happen to serve beer. Those partitions were ripped out of almost every pub in Britain during the twentieth century in the name of openness. These ones were put back.

Cittie of Yorke, High Holborn.

A pub here since 1430. Six minutes east. The current building is a 1920s reconstruction, so it is technically an ancient pub doing an impression of a slightly less ancient pub, which is somehow more medieval rather than less. The back bar is a soaring great hall with a trussed roof, Gothic windows, an iron stove of genuinely alarming size, and a row of wooden cubicles down one side. It looks like the dining hall of a minor Oxford college that has given up on scholarship entirely. Closed Sundays.

Ye Olde Mitre, Ely Court. Founded 1546.

Built by the Bishop of Ely for the staff of his palace next door, and hidden down a passage off Hatton Garden that looks exactly like a service entrance for a jeweller. It is regularly described as the hardest pub in London to find. If you are standing in an alley wondering whether you have made a mistake, you are about ten feet from the door. Inside: tiny panelled rooms, a proper snug, no music, and the preserved trunk of a cherry tree in the corner that supposedly marked a boundary and around which Elizabeth I supposedly danced with Sir Christopher Hatton. There is no evidence for any of this, which is precisely why everyone keeps saying it. This is a myth. Enjoy telling it anyway.

The Seven Stars, Carey Street. Built 1602.

Older than the Great Fire, and one of the buildings that came through it. It sits directly behind the Royal Courts of Justice and is consequently full of barristers being barristers at each other. It is small, eccentric and slightly chaotic. There is a pub cat. The cat outranks everyone. Children are politely not admitted, which tells you all you need to know about the intended atmosphere.

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Fleet Street. Rebuilt 1667.

The Great Fire went through in 1666. This went back up the following year, and the interior has been left alone for the best part of four centuries since. It is a warren of low, dark, wood-panelled rooms across several floors, with cellars underneath belonging to a medieval monastery that stood on the site before any of it. Dickens drank here. Mark Twain drank here. You will drink here and then hit your head on a beam, joining a tradition roughly three hundred and fifty years deep.

The practical bit

Date: Saturday 3rd October. A Saturday, deliberately. Why Saturday: the City empties out at weekends, so we get seats rather than standing in a stranger's armpit. Sunday is impossible, because two of these are shut.

Meet: 2:00pm at Outside Holborn Tube.

Cost: free to turn up. The pubs take a different view.

Leaving early is built into this Three pubs is a complete afternoon. Five is a decision you are making about yourself and we accept no responsibility for it.

Do the Princess Louise, the Cittie of Yorke and Ye Olde Mitre, go home at four, and you have seen 1891, 1430 and 1546 in the space of three hours. That is a full and proper day out. Nobody is keeping a register and there is no medal…