![]() ![]() In ‘London: The Biography’, Peter Ackroyd explains how ‘for many trades the only employment agency was a specific public house… Bakers and tailors, plumbers and bookbinders, congregated in one place where masters arrived “to enquire when they want hands”.’ The tradesmen had pay tables at the same taverns, where the employees would receive their wage and promptly pour it down their throat while waiting for the next job. Innkeepers were often involved in the chicanery that occured on their premises to the extent that in the fourteenth century, a law was passed which prohibited any landlord from retaining the belongings of anyone who happened to die on his premises.Ĭuriously, these taverns were also early job centres. These taverns and alehouses were low dens, places for gaming and cockfighting, fighting, thieving and drinking. Such pubs were a centre for London social life from the start – as reading Chaucer will make clear – and in the early fourteenth century, there were already 354 taverns in the city. Have a pint at London’s last galleried coaching inn, The George Inn (77 Borough High St, SE1) and you’re drinking liquid history. When age and history become attractions in their own right, unscrupulous and enterprising landlords will always be happy to muddy the waters in a bid to gain custom.Īlthough London’s history can be measured in both pubs and churches, it is in the former that the Londoner – native or otherwise – can most easily and enjoyably engage with the past. Such confusion of name, location, licence and architecture makes finding London’s definitive oldest pub almost impossible, but it means a tourist will never be far from a claimant. Then there’s the Angel (101 Bermondsey Wall, SE16), which since the fifteenth century was a pub kept by monks at the nearby eleventh-century Benedictine monastery, but was rebuilt in the nineteenth-century. The White Hart (191 Drury Lane, WC2) boldly claims to be ‘the oldest licensed premises in London’, despite scant evidence and countless refits. Is it the Lamb & Flag (33 Rose St, WC2), which occupies a building said to date to Tudor times but has only (only!) been a licensed premises since 1623? Or the Cittie Of York (22 High Holborn, WC1), which has been the site of an inn since 1420 even if the building itself dates to around 1645 and was almost completely rebuilt in the 1890s, while the name was pinched from an older tavern that used to sit across the road? There are as many candidates as there are criteria. So it’s no surprise there is such contention over the sticky question of which London pub can call itself the city’s oldest. ![]() Age is always a thorny subject for conversation, and all the more so when alcohol is involved. ![]()
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