A Pub's Age Is a Claim: Three London Pubs and What the Records Say

Ask a London pub how old it is and it will usually tell you. Ask the listing text, the National Trust or the Survey of London and you tend to get something quieter and more interesting. Three pubs on Roamer's London walks show it well.

The George Inn: rebuilt in 1677

The National Trust, which owns the George in Southwark, calls it London's last remaining galleried inn. Its heritage record says the building stands on the site of an inn that existed in 1542, that the Southwark fire of 1676 destroyed the previous inn, and that the present building was constructed in 1677. Historic England lists it at Grade I as the south range of a coaching inn once ranged around a quadrangle, with galleries on two upper floors. The north range was pulled down in the nineteenth century by a railway company. In 1937 the inn was given to the National Trust, which leases it to Greene King. The founding date is the one worth quoting, because someone can check it: 1542 for an inn on the site, 1677 for the building.

The George is the last stop of the South Bank and Bankside walk. The longer story is in The George Inn.

The Jamaica Wine House: a Victorian front and a plaque

In St Michael's Alley in the City, the Jamaica Wine House is a red-brick and red-stone Victorian building. Historic England lists it at Grade II as late nineteenth century, and a link block joining it to the church of St Michael, Cornhill, is dated 1868. The pub's own page says it opened on the spot in 1652 and counts Samuel Pepys among its earliest patrons, and also says it dates back to 1869 in an art nouveau style. Both cannot be true of the same building, and neither claim is in the listing.

What the wall does carry is a plaque, which says the first London coffee house stood here, at the sign of Pasqua Rosee's Head, in 1652. According to the secondary accounts, Pasqua Rosée ran it from a shed in the churchyard of St Michael's, not from the pub. The plaque is the plaque's claim. No entry in Pepys's diary naming Rosée's turned up in the research for this article, so the pub's tie to Pepys stays unproven. So the plaque tells you about a coffee house of the 1650s, the pub is a building of the 1860s, and the two have nothing to do with each other beyond the address.

The Jamaica Wine House is stop 7 of the City of London walk, where the walk treats it from the alley outside rather than going in.

The Ten Bells: a corner and a story

The Ten Bells on Fournier Street, in Spitalfields, is listed at Grade II as a mid-nineteenth-century building, "founded 1666" in the listing though the entry does not say where that date comes from. The Survey of London finds a new messuage and warehouses built on the site by John Sabatier by 1758, and gives no date for the pub itself. Its reputation comes from the 1888 Ripper murders, but the record that ties it to them is thin, and is told in The Ten Bells.

What to take from it

A pub is a building doing the same job it was built for, and that is a real continuity. But the date on the sign is worth a second look. The questions to ask are who built the thing that stands there now, when the nearest fire was, and whether the plaque is talking about the pub or the plot. The answers are in the listing text, in the National Trust's heritage records and in the Survey of London, and they are usually more specific than the sign.