The Pub as a 400-Year Character: Why London's Drinking Houses Outlast Everything Else

Walk into the Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street and the first thing you notice is the ceiling. It is low, dark, smoke-stained from three centuries of fires, and the timbers cross at angles that no modern architect would choose. The doorway you came through is barely six feet high. The corridor zigzags into a small back room with sawdust on the floor and a fireplace that has been burning, on and off, since the building was rebuilt in 1667. Samuel Johnson is supposed to have sat at the table to the left of the fire. Charles Dickens definitely did. The list goes on.

The Cheshire Cheese is one of perhaps a dozen surviving pubs in central London that genuinely predate the Victorian era. It is also one of the only buildings in the Square Mile, full stop, that genuinely predates the Victorian era. To understand how it is still standing, you have to understand what London usually does to its old buildings, and why pubs are the exception.

What London usually does

The standard fate of an old London building is to be replaced. The 1666 Great Fire destroyed roughly four-fifths of the City of London inside the walls. The Blitz destroyed perhaps a quarter of what the Fire had left. Postwar redevelopment removed most of what survived the Blitz. The 1980s financial deregulation, the so-called Big Bang of 1986, demolished most of what the postwar planners had not got to.

By the early twenty-first century, a typical block in the financial core had been comprehensively rebuilt at least four times since 1665. The street pattern survives. The property lines survive. The buildings do not.

The pubs are the exception, and the exception is structural.

Why a pub is hard to demolish

A central London pub from the seventeenth or eighteenth century typically sits on a small freehold plot, often just one or two narrow building widths wide, often on a corner or in a narrow alley. The plot is too small for a developer to put a modern office on. To get a viable modern building, the developer would have to assemble three or four adjacent plots, each separately owned. The negotiation costs of buying out three or four owners, often with different legal positions, is high. If one of the owners refuses to sell, the assembly fails and the whole project becomes uneconomic.

This is why pubs cluster on corners and in alleys. The Cheshire Cheese is at the bottom of Wine Office Court, an alley off Fleet Street. The Black Friar sits in a wedge of land that no one could profitably build on. Ye Olde Watling is on a narrow plot Wren himself laid out after the Fire to house the workers building St Paul's. The George Inn in Southwark is on a coaching-yard plot that was never broken up after the coaches stopped running. In each case, the plot is the wrong shape for redevelopment.

The pubs that have not survived this filter are the ones on bigger plots, on wider streets, where the maths worked for a developer. There were thousands of those once. There are almost none left.

The 1666 rebuild rule

Most of the surviving City pubs are not actually medieval. They are seventeenth-century rebuilds on medieval plots. The 1667 Rebuilding Act, passed by Parliament after the Great Fire, required all new buildings inside the City wall to be brick or stone, no longer timber. It also fixed the street pattern more or less exactly as it had been before the Fire. The Fire-damaged plots were sold back to their pre-Fire owners, who were required to rebuild within a certain time or forfeit. The post-Fire City is therefore a brick-and-stone version of the pre-Fire city, on the exact same medieval lot lines.

The Cheshire Cheese was rebuilt in 1667 on the plot of the pub that had stood there before, which had been rebuilt at least once before that on top of vaulted cellars belonging to a thirteenth-century Carmelite monastery. The cellars are still there. The plot is the same. The building is the third or fourth structure to sit on it.

Ye Olde Watling, four blocks south on Watling Street, was built in 1668 specifically by Christopher Wren to house workmen building the new St Paul's Cathedral. It is therefore a Wren building, in the same sense the cathedral itself is. It is one of the very few Wren buildings in the City that is still functioning, day in and day out, for its original purpose.

The Victorian wave

The nineteenth century produced its own pub-building wave. London's population tripled between 1801 and 1901, and the pub industry expanded to match. By the 1880s the city had something like six thousand pubs, one for every eighty inhabitants. Many of the most ornate London pubs date from this period and are technically Victorian gin palaces: elaborate plasterwork, etched mirrors, mahogany fittings, brass rails. The Black Friar on Queen Victoria Street is the Arts and Crafts variant of the type, rebuilt internally in 1905 by the architect Herbert Fuller-Clark in a half-medieval, half-Art-Nouveau style that has no real parallel anywhere else in Europe.

The Victorian pub-building wave also produced the layout that is now treated as the traditional English pub layout: bar in the middle, snug at the side, public bar and saloon bar separated by class, food at the back. None of this is medieval. It is largely a product of the 1880s licensing arrangements and the brewing companies' standardised fittings.

The surviving Victorian pubs survived for the same plot-shape reason the older pubs did. The Black Friar's wedge plot was too small for a road-widening that nearly demolished it in the 1960s. The poet John Betjeman led the campaign that saved it. The wedge is still there.

The Tudor coaching inn

The George Inn in Southwark is the rarest London pub category: a galleried coaching inn. There were once perhaps thirty galleried coaching inns in the borough of Southwark, providing accommodation for travellers arriving in London by horse-drawn coach from the south of England. They were rectangular yards open at the top, with a coaching arch at one end for vehicles, and timber galleries running along the upper floors of the surrounding buildings. The galleries served as access corridors for the upper-floor rooms and as viewing platforms when plays were performed in the yard below.

When the railways arrived in the 1830s and 1840s, the coaching trade collapsed within a single generation, and most of the inns were demolished. The George survived, in part because the Great Northern Railway bought the property in 1873 and used the inn buildings as a goods depot rather than demolishing them. It is now owned by the National Trust, which acquired it in 1937 specifically because it was the last of its kind.

The George's surviving wing is half of what it once was. The opposite gallery was demolished in 1899. What remains is a south-facing wing of three timber galleries above a ground-floor bar. The bar's stone-flagged floor is still original. The ceiling beams are seventeenth-century, from the 1677 rebuild after the great Southwark fire of 1676, which was a different fire from the City fire of 1666 and almost as destructive locally.

The literature problem

There is a second reason London's pubs survive beyond the property-shape one: they were the writing room of a great deal of English literature. Samuel Pepys's diaries reference dozens of seventeenth-century pubs and taverns by name. Dr Johnson and Boswell wrote about the Cheshire Cheese. Dickens used pubs as set pieces in nearly every novel, including the George in Little Dorrit. P.G. Wodehouse used the Cheshire Cheese as the model for the Bandersnatch Club. Mark Twain wrote a sketch about Polly the African grey parrot that lived behind the Cheshire Cheese bar until her death in 1926.

This literary record gave the buildings a soft kind of protection. A developer in 1960 could not easily demolish the pub Charles Dickens wrote about without unmanageable public consequences. The literature was part of the building's value, in the same way a building's age or its architectural fittings were. The pubs became, in effect, partly cultural property.

The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act formalised this with the listing system. Most surviving historic pubs are now Grade II or Grade II* listed, which makes demolition or major alteration legally complicated. The Cheshire Cheese is Grade II*. The Black Friar is Grade II*. The George is Grade I, the highest category. The listing system codified what the literature had already established.

What the buildings still do

A pub is one of the very few building types where the original use is also the current use. The Cheshire Cheese is still a pub. It serves Samuel Smith's beer to people who walk in off Fleet Street. The fireplace is still the same fireplace. The cellars are still the same cellars. The interior smells the way pubs have smelled for several hundred years: beer, woodsmoke, fat in a fryer.

This is the unusual virtue of the type. Most historic buildings in London are no longer used for what they were built for. The Banqueting House on Whitehall is no longer a banqueting hall. The Bank of England building is a museum, not the working part of the bank. St Paul's is still a cathedral but the cathedral is now also a tourist site that charges admission. Westminster Abbey is the same. The Tower of London has been a fortress, prison, mint, zoo, and is now a museum.

The Cheshire Cheese has been a pub since 1667. The George has been a pub or inn since 1542. Ye Olde Watling has been a pub since 1668. These are continuous-use buildings doing what they have always done, with the same tools, for the same customers, in the same room.

That continuity is the thesis of the Pub History tour. The buildings are the characters. Their regulars come and go in batches of two or three generations. The buildings do not. They are the longest-running continuous operation in the City of London, older than the Bank of England, older than St Paul's in its current form, older than half the streets that lead to them. They survive because their plots are too small to redevelop and their walls have too much published material on them. They get to be 350 years old by being inconveniently small and inconveniently famous. The cheap pint at the bar is, in a precise sense, a subsidy from London's failure to demolish them.