City pubs past: half a dozen lost City of London inns and taverns
- London On The Ground
- 12 minutes ago
- 9 min read
A selection of drinking houses on which last orders were called long ago, but which have left a legacy in the Square Mile.
The City of London still has a large number of pubs, but its history is crowded with a vast array of vanished inns, taverns, alehouses and hotels that thrived catering to the Square Mile’s once large population of residents and its numerous visitors.
In the first of what could be an occasional series of posts on this theme, here is my selection of six of the best.
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1. Boar's Head Tavern, Eastcheap
The Boar’s Head Tavern achieved lasting fame as the preferred watering hole in Shakespeare’s Henry IV for Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal and others, watched over by landlady Mistress Quickly.
It stood on Eastcheap, close to its modern day junction with King William Street. Some sources note that the first reference to the Boar’s Head is in 1349, while others say there is no proof that it existed at the time of Henry IV in the 15th century. Either way, it was certainly there in Shakespeare’s day and so would have been known to his audiences.
Destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and then rebuilt, the Boar’s Head continued as a tavern until the late 18th century, when its use changed to retail. The building was demolished in 1831 to make way for the construction of King William Street as the new approach road to London Bridge.
However, two tangible references to it can still be seen.
The first, a very short distance to the east along Eastcheap, is a Gothic Revival former vinegar warehouse building of 1868 (now offices) by architect Robert Louis Roumieu. Its facade includes a carved stone boar’s head and the faces of Henry IV and Henry V (who was known as Prince Hal in his younger days).
This building divides opinion. Artist Geoffrey Fletcher called it "…a fascinating affair in which movement manages to stop short of restlessness or even feverishness. … it is all great fun, and fun is an ingredient now entirely lost to architecture."
However, architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner said it was "one of the maddest displays in London of gabled Gothic brick", while another architectural critic, Ian Nairn, characterised it as "the scream you wake on at the end of a nightmare".
The second, and more authentic, reference to the Boar’s Head is on display in the foyer of Shakespeare’s Globe over the river on Bankside. This is the carved stone pub sign (not surprisingly, a boar’s head) from the post-Great Fire building.
2. Bull and Mouth Inn
The Bull and Mouth was a galleried coaching inn connecting London with destinations all over Britain. It stood between Bull and Mouth Street (which ran along the south edge of what is now Postman’s Park) and Angel Street, off St Martin’s Le Grand, a short distance north of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Its origins date back to medieval/Tudor times and its name is a corruption of Boulogne Mouth, a reference to the French town and its harbour. Rebuilt after the Great Fire, the inn gave its name to Bull and Mouth Street, which first appeared on the Gilby and Morgan map of London of 1676.
After the General Post Office was completed nearby on St Martin’s Le Grand in 1829, the coaching entrepreneur Edward Sherman rebuilt the inn as part of the Queen’s Hotel. The hotel, which had underground stabling for 700 horses, was right at the start of the mail coach route leading north along the Great North Road.
Competition from railways led to the decline of the coaching business and the hotel was demolished in the late 1880s to make way for more post office buildings.
An ornate carved relief of a bull standing inside a wide open mouth, which once adorned the entrance to the Queen’s Hotel, can still be seen. It is tucked away in the former garden of the Museum of London, within the rotunda of the roundabout joining St Martin’s Le Grand, London Wall and Aldersgate Street.
It includes a curious inscription, a reference to Milo of Crete, an ancient Greek wrestler, possibly because he is sometimes portrayed carrying a bull:
Milo the Cretonian
An ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal,
Ye gods, what a glorious twist!
3. The Mermaid Tavern
The Mermaid Tavern is another lost tavern with a Shakespeare link. It was located between Friday Street and Bread Street, both of which led south from Cheapside. According to the website of The Agas Map of Early Modern London, it stood where the offices at 25 Cannon Street is now.
In Elizabethan times, a drinking club of London’s leading literary lights met there every month and discussed politics, religion and literature. Members are said to have included Ben Jonson, John Donne, William Beaumont, John Fletcher and other leading poets, playwrights and writers. According to legend, battle-of-wits debates between Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare were a feature of these sessions.
Shakespeare certainly knew many of the writers said to patronise the Mermaid, whose landlord William Johnson was a trustee for the mortgage on Shakespeare’s purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse in 1613. However, there is no evidence that Shakespeare took part in these monthly sessions.
4. City of London Tavern
The City of London Tavern, which stood at 1-3 Bishopsgate, was much more than a tavern. More commonly known as the London Tavern, it had a grand banqueting hall and committee rooms and housed great events and meetings.
Its original date of founding is unclear, but it had to be rebuilt after a fire destroyed it in 1765. When it reopened in 1768, it was described as “the grandest tavern in Europe”.
Its kitchen was so large and successful that it also catered for large events at other venues. Probably the grandest of these was the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at Guildhall in 1837, attended by Queen Victoria in the year of her accession to the throne. The banquet supplied by the London Tavern included 1,100 pints of turtle soup, 60 roast turkeys, 80 pheasants, 10 leverets, 40 partridges, 40 fowl and more.
Although almost entirely forgotten now, the London Tavern was famous for being the birthplace of new companies, institutions, charities and clubs. Charles Dickens set fictional meetings there and also presided over real life meetings within its walls.
Among the organisations that founded here were
the Society of Gentleman Supporters of the Bill of Rights (1769, to support the radical journalist, writer and politician John Wilkes),
the London Society (1805, an educational institution that preceded, and was eventually absorbed by, the University of London),
the Sailors’ Society charity (1818, founded as the Port of London Society),
the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (1824) and
Middlesex County Cricket Club (1863).
Other meetings of notable groups held here included
the Revolution Society (1788),
pro-slavery campaigners led by merchant, ship owner and politician George Hibbert (1789),
the Restoration Committee of St George the Martyr, Scouthwark,
backers of the Thames Tunnel project (1824, designed by Marc Brunel, this became the first ever tunnel built under a navigable river),
the Great Western Railway (1839, a meeting to decide on the gauge, attended by Marc Brunel’s son - and the railway’s engineer - Isambard Kingdom Brunel),
the Marine and General Mutual Life Assurance Society (1852, eventually absorbed by Scottish Friendly and dissolved in 2018 when it was Britain’s oldest registered company) and
a dinner to launch the Playground and General Recreation Society (1858, to create playgrounds in St Pancras and Marylebone, Charles Dickens presided).
In Dickens' 1839 book Nicholas Nickleby, a meeting is held at the London Tavern to consider petitioning Parliament in favour of the fictional (and wonderfully named) United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.
In real life, Dickens also spoke at the London Tavern as Chairman of the Printers’ Association, as host of the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution, in the chair of a meeting of the Clerks’ School for Orphan and Necessitous Children and as President of the Nautilus Rowing Club.
While attending the General Theatrical Fund Association’s annual dinner at the tavern in 1851, Dickens was informed that his infant daughter Dora had died suddenly after he had left his house earlier that day.
The City of London Tavern closed in 1876 in the face of a decline in its business and was bought by the Royal Bank of Scotland and replaced by an extension to the bank’s premises next door. HSBC is now on the site.
5. Castle Inn
Little is known about the Castle Inn, which stood on or near Lawrence Lane in the vicinity of Guildhall.
Its inclusion here is entirely due to the rather splendid stone depiction of a castle that is displayed on the wall of a modern office building in a very small alleyway between Lawrence Lane and King Street, almost entirely hidden by a branch of Pret A Manger on Gresham Street.
The three-dimensional and very detailed pub sign appears to be made of stone, but it could be of painted wood, ceramic or some other material.
There are references to a ‘Castle’ or ‘Castle Tavern’ at this location in the 17th century and lists of residents (presumably also the licensees) from the early 1800s until the early 1900s when the location became the premises of a stationers.
6. The Fortune of War
The Fortune of War stood on the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, in the Smithfield area.
The pub gained notoriety in the late 18th century and early 19th century, when it served as a kind of showroom for dead bodies sold by grave robbers to surgeons at St Bartholomew’s Hospital over the road and other hospitals.
Gangs of body snatchers, also known as ‘resurrectionists’, stole freshly buried bodies from graveyards, including that of the nearby St Sepulchre’s Church, and sold them to anatomists for the study and teaching of anatomy at a time of growing demand for corpses.
The only legal source of corpses for dissection was executed criminals, the supply of which fell in the early 19th century just as demand was growing to develop further the expanding understanding of medical science. Bodies could fetch up to £50, a considerable sum.
One of the most notorious gangs was led by a man called John Bishop (no relation to the Scouse comedian of the same name). They went beyond mere grave-robbing in 1831, when they murdered a 14 year old boy. When they took the body to sell to King’s College School of Anatomy in the Strand, the demonstrator of anatomy became suspicious on inspecting it that it had not been buried. In his confession, Bishop admitted to stealing between 500 and 1,000 bodies over a 12 year period.
Bishop and accomplice Thomas Williams were hanged outside Newgate Prison on 5 December 1831, in front of a crowd of 30,000. Immediately afterwards, Bishop’s body was taken to King’s College and Williams’ to the Theatre of Anatomy in Windmill Street for dissection.
The Fortune of War was demolished in 1910, but the Golden Boy statue that used to stand on its Giltspur street wall can still be seen on the same street corner, a location previously known as Pye Corner.
The statue was originally created to mark the spot where the Great Fire of London ended in 1666. The fire had started in Pudding Lane and ended at Pye Corner and the combination of Pudding and Pye led to a popular belief that the conflagration was God’s punishment for the gluttony of Londoners. The boy, who is meant to look plump, represents the sin of gluttony.
In fact, neither ‘pudding’ nor ‘pye’ refer to food in this context. The ‘pudding’ of Pudding Lane refers to the off-cuts of animals that nobody wants to eat and the ‘pye’ of Pye Corner is a shortening of ‘Magpye’ or ‘Magpie’, yet another lost pub that had once stood at this location.
Please click below to see my short YouTube video on this topic.
For more City street names that don't mean what you think, please see City of London Street names: a dozen of the best and City of London Street names: a dozen that don’t mean what you think.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
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