The George Inn: The Last Galleried Coaching Yard in London

The George Inn sits on a narrow yard off Borough High Street in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, about a quarter-mile downstream from London Bridge. The yard is open to the sky. Two stories of wooden gallery run along the back, with bedroom doors opening directly onto the gallery, the way they have since the building was finished in 1677. Below the galleries, a brick-paved courtyard wide enough to turn a four-horse coach. This is the last building of its kind in London. There were once perhaps six hundred of them.

The coaching inn as building type

Before the railways, every English road journey of any distance involved a coaching inn. A passenger coach could cover roughly fifty miles in a day at trot, with stops every ten miles to change horses. London's road network funnelled all of southern England through Southwark, because Southwark was the village on the southern end of London Bridge, the only bridge across the Thames in central London until 1750. Anyone walking, riding, or coaching from Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone, Brighton, Tunbridge, Chichester, Portsmouth, or Southampton arrived in Southwark. Anyone leaving London for those destinations departed from Southwark. The cluster of inns along Borough High Street between the bridge and St George the Martyr church served as the road terminus for half the country.

The standard plan was an open courtyard, three or four storeys tall, surrounded on three sides by buildings, with a single arched entrance from the street wide enough to admit a coach and its horses. Around the inner court ran open wooden galleries on each upper floor, with bedrooms opening directly onto the galleries. The ground floor held the coffee room and the taproom on one side, the stables and coach-houses on the other. The yard itself worked as the operational space. Coaches came in and turned around. Luggage was loaded and unloaded. Hostlers led horses to the stables. Letters changed hands at the gate. The inn was simultaneously a hotel, a stable, a restaurant, a post office, and a small transport terminal.

This is the building type the George preserves. The standard plan is not a metaphor. The George was operated on it for two hundred years.

The fire of 1676 and the rebuild

There has been an inn on this site since at least 1542, and the medieval Tabard Inn next door is the one Geoffrey Chaucer named as the gathering place of his pilgrims in the late 1380s. Whether the George stood as such in 1380 is uncertain. What is certain is that a great Southwark fire on the night of 26 May 1676 destroyed more than five hundred houses along Borough High Street, including the Tabard and the original George. The Southwark fire is now forgotten because it happened ten years after the City fire of 1666, and that other fire took the entire historical imagination of the period. But the Southwark fire reset Borough High Street as completely as 1666 reset the City.

The George was rebuilt within a year, in 1677, in red brick and oak frame, on the same footprint as before. The yard was kept open. The galleries were rebuilt in their original configuration. This is what happens in a city without planning regulations: a destroyed building is replaced by an almost-identical building, because the new owner inherits the same trade, the same plot, and the same operational logic. The 1677 George you stand in today is a faithful reconstruction of a sixteenth-century inn, made by people who saw nothing strange about reproducing what had just burned.

The Tabard next door was also rebuilt after 1676. It survived in some form until 1873, when it was demolished for warehousing. After that, the George was the only intact survivor of the coaching-inn cluster on Borough High Street.

The railways kill the building type

Coaching inns died because railways killed coaches. The first passenger railway into central London, the London and Greenwich Railway, opened in 1836. By the late 1840s, the major intercity lines were running. By the early 1860s, no one rode a coach from London to Dover when they could take the train, which was faster, cheaper, and didn't stop overnight at an inn at Rochester. The coaching trade evaporated within twenty years. The buildings that had supported it were left with no commercial purpose.

Most of them were demolished. The land in Southwark was valuable, and a building designed around a thirty-foot-wide courtyard surrounded by wooden galleries was the worst possible use of a deep narrow urban plot. Developers replaced the inns with warehouses and tenements that filled the full footprint. The Tabard went. The White Hart went. The Queen's Head, the Spur, the Bull, the Catherine Wheel, the King's Head, the Boar's Head, the Cross Keys, all gone, mostly by the 1890s.

The George should have gone too. Between 1874 and 1889 the Great Northern Railway acquired the inn for warehousing related to the expanding lines at London Bridge Station, and demolished two of the three wings. The north and east sides of the courtyard came down. Only the south wing, the one you see today, was left standing, because the railway company found it useful for storage. The wing held offices, hop warehousing, and stables for the railway's own horses. The galleries and bedrooms upstairs were boarded up. The taproom on the ground floor was kept open as a pub for railway workers.

That partial demolition is why the George today is the most asymmetrical of buildings. It is one wing of a courtyard plan, with the other two sides erased and replaced by blank later wall. To picture what it once looked like, mentally extend the surviving gallery in an L around what is now the courtyard floor. That is the historic configuration. What you see is one third of it.

The National Trust acquisition

The George passed through several owners after the railways were nationalised in 1923. In 1937 the building, by then the property of the London and North Eastern Railway, was donated to the National Trust. The donation was a heritage gesture by a company that had no further commercial use for the structure. The Trust's standard mode of operating, then and now, is to lease properties to operators on long contracts that bind them to maintain historic fabric. The George has been operated under that arrangement ever since, currently leased to Greene King, with the Trust retaining ownership and conservation responsibility.

The 1937 donation is the reason the building is still here. Every other galleried coaching inn in London was demolished by a private owner with a redevelopment interest. The George was protected because, by the time anyone had a redevelopment interest, it belonged to an institution whose entire job is to refuse redevelopment.

It received Grade I listing in 1950, the highest possible heritage designation in England. About 2.5 percent of listed buildings in England carry Grade I status. The same designation covers Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey. A working pub in Southwark sits in that category because there is nowhere else to put it: there is no other surviving example of its type, and the building type itself was once the basic infrastructure of English road travel.

What to look for

Stand in the yard and look up. The south wing has two storeys of gallery above the ground floor. The galleries are open wooden walkways with simple turned balusters, supported by oak posts running up from the courtyard floor. The bedroom doors open directly onto the gallery rather than off an internal corridor. Each gallery served as the access route to half a dozen rooms. In 1750 you would have arrived by coach, climbed the wooden stair at one end of the gallery, walked along the open balcony to your door, and slept with the courtyard noise rising up through the open gallery all night. There were no internal corridors because the corridor was outside and made of oak.

The ground floor coffee room, now the Middle Bar, was the original eating and drinking room for travellers. Charles Dickens drank in this room in the 1850s, when it had a different name and a different counter and probably a much smokier ceiling. He mentions the George by name in Little Dorrit, in the scene where Tip Dorrit writes a letter from "the Coffee Room of the George". Dickens lived just down the road in Lant Street for a period of his youth. He used the George as a setting because it was the inn nearest his childhood lodgings.

The yard is sometimes used for open-air theatre. Performances of Shakespeare have been staged in the courtyard since the 1930s, in conscious revival of a practice that may date to the original inn's existence in the 1590s. Inn-yards across Elizabethan London served as informal theatres, with audiences leaning over the galleries to watch the stage set up at one end of the yard. Whether Shakespeare's company ever played in the George specifically is unprovable. The Tabard next door, the inn Chaucer named, almost certainly hosted performances. The two inns were essentially neighbours, sharing a wall.

Borough Market is a thirty-second walk from the George's yard gate. The pub closes at eleven on weekdays. The cask ale, a Greene King beer plus rotating guests, is the right end to a Southwark walk. Take it in the courtyard if the weather holds. Take it in the gallery bar upstairs if it doesn't. Either way, the room you are sitting in is the last working room of the building type that moved people through England before the trains.