A Slice of London Pub Heritage

My trips to London often involve racing past the centre to get to a suburban Wetherspoon's or a Bexleyheath local that serves me Doom Bar and lasts one year in the Good Beer Guide.
So it made a nice change recently to stick around the Fleet Street area on a sunny day and visit some classics.

The next two posts contain:
➤ Pubs you've heard of!  
➤ Three three-star Historic Interiors!
➤ At least one treacherous staircase.
➤ Beer prices to bring me out in a cold sweat.

As we'd made our own ways to London by train and bus, I met Oxford CAMRA Chairman John in Chancery Lane for a spot of breakfast, before we made our way to the first pub of the day.

 

The Blackfriar (174 Queen Victoria Street, Blackfriars, London, EC4V 4EG)
The Blackfriar was built in 1875 on the site of an ancient Dominican friary.  It was remodelled around 1905 by architect Herbert Fuller-Clark who went to town with Arts and Craft and Art Nouveau styles within.  He employed sculptors to work with marble, wood and copper throughout the pub to create the elaborate rooms we see today.

I wonder if anyone at the time thought it was over-the-top and a bit gimmicky?
If Waxy O Connors in Covent Garden survives the next hundred years will folks marvel its 'heritage' interior?
Not everyone appreciated the Blackfriar in the sixties, when planners had the urge to demolish it to make way for brutal concrete blocks.  Poet Sir John Betjeman was one of the loudest voices campaigning against these plans, several years before the building was given Grade II listed status in 1972.

It's glorious in every direction you look, from the archways to the snug dining room at the rear, to the narrowing seating at the tip of the wedge.  The stained glass, marble pillars, the relief above the fireplace and the depictions of cheery friars having a whale of a time in copper above the bar, make for incredible surroundings.

 

The pedant in me wants to mention that it was the Franciscans, in brown capes (not the Dominican friars in black) that had a brewing tradition and were of a more jovial persuasion.  Black friars were very serious and studious and had little time for the frivolities depicted in the pub decorations.

The bar staff who served us had little time for frivolity either - service without a smile.
Myself and John both picked 'Pride' from the choice of 4 cask ales.  In good condition - just about - although not quite filling the glass to the brim when you're charging £7 a pint irks me a bit.

The Blackfriar is a pub that will always be worth calling in to regardless of the beer - £3.50 for a half pint a reasonable entry fee to marvel the exquisite interior.

Right...more wedge-shaped pubs, please!

The Cockpit (7 St Andrew's Hill, Blackfriars, London, EC4V 5BY)
This used to be my second closest pub when I was lucky enough to live in the narrow lanes by St Pauls at the end of the nineties.  Back then it sat next to an empty lot, never seemed to get very busy and served a so-so pint of Courage.  It was a heck of a lot better than Ryan's Bar on Carter Lane that my sometime flatmate used to insist on dragging me to, yet I only occasionally paid the Cockpit a visit.

An earlier building on this site operated as a venue for the unsavoury pursuit of cock-fighting until that was banned in 1840.  The venue then became a public house called the Three Castles, rebranding to disassociate itself with the prohibited gambling pass-time which still provides a name to many a pub to this day.  It got a Victorian re-build around 1865, providing us with the picturesque inn we see today.
By the 1980s, the original name was restored, the decorative gallery mimicking a layout where spectators would have gathered to watch the fighting cocks below.  

It's a glorious retro pub room, complete with trad carpet, bench seating, pewter mugs, and great old Courage livery above the bar.
It didn't stay as empty as in my picture for very long, local workers and tourists popping in to fill up the tables and choice vertical drinking spots on the alleyway to the side.
Two London brews from Southwark and Five Points, a 'Sussex Best' and Britain's best selling cask ale were on offer at the bar.

We both plumped for the Five Points 'XPA', a reliable crisp pale ale.  Served in good condition - a better good than the Pride had been in the Blackfriar, but not quite 'very good'.   If it hadn't been outlawed on the CAMRA scoring system it'd be a three-and-a-half!

As the lunchtime office workers descended on the sandwich bars, we strolled across Ludgate Circus onto Fleet Street and made our way to the Old Bell.

The Old Bell (95 Fleet Street, Temple, London, EC4Y 1DH)
Back in the days when Fleet Street was the epicentre of British newspapers, I suspect the Old Bell would have been smoky, boozy, and packed full on a Thursday lunchtime.  No artisan sandwiches required for lunch in those days.  It wasn't packed full on our visit: the staff completing a few cleaning tasks with just a couple of other customers in.  No chance of anyone leaving any top secret dossiers on the table next to us, as is said to have happened back in 1951. 

This current building traces its history back to 1678 when it was rebuilt following the Great Fire of London. It was once the site of Fleet Street's very first printing press, later becoming a pub of many names before settling on the Old Bell.

We found two handpumps ambitiously labelled 'Tap Takeover' serving Timothy Taylor brews, alongside Wainwright 'back soon' and the St Austell house ale.

Two halves of 'Golden Best' please.
The best bit of the pub is the front room next to the lovely lead stained glass windows.  You could almost imagine you were in the 18th century...  oh no, hang on.  You can't because of the generic dull 2020s pop being played with the volume a notch too high.  We settled instead at the rear of the pub with a view of St Brides church.

A hop, skip and a jump through the stationary buses on Fleet Street took us to the narrow alleyway leading to the Cheshire Cheese.

Olde Cheshire Cheese (145 Fleet Street, Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2BU)

Like everything in this bit of London, the Cheshire Cheese dates back to 1667, just after the Great Fire of London necessitated an awful lot of building work.  Prior to that it's believed to have been the site of an earlier inn called The Horn.
If you're looking for a roster of literary types as pub regulars, then the Olde Cheshire Cheese does rather well with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Samuel Johnson all said to have popped by and drank here.

It's is a warren of rooms.  The wood panelled bar just to the right of the doorway is a dimly-lit delight of an olde worlde pub room, with a dining room to one side and two more spaces with a slightly more modern feel to the back.  Clamber down the staircase ("mind your head, John!") and there are three subterranean spaces under barrelled brick ceilings.  The cellars are said to date back to a 13th century Carmelite monastery (the white friars - I'm doing well with varieties of friars in this post).   

This is a pub where maintaining the 'no electronic devices' policy is challenging, with a procession of tourists popping in who - of course - want a picture of this slice of pub history.  It did seem the rules were loosely applied, with permission granted for us to snap a pump-clip pic.  I didn't have the cheek (or a good enough camera) to capture the ground floor rooms.
But I did get a photographic record the challenging staircase...

And the beer?
The 'Old Brewery Bitter' from the wood was thoroughly enjoyable.  Didn't Sam Smith's used to be the bargain option in the capital, though?  That's definitely no longer the case.

We wandered a little further up Fleet Street until we reached another pub with 'Ye Olde' in the title.

Olde Cock Tavern (22 Fleet Street, Temple, London, EC4Y 1AA)
I haven't taken the best picture of the Olde Cock.  You need to be across the road to capture how narrow it is, five floors squeezed in between the neighbouring buildings.  Fleet Street was ridiculously traffic-clogged, so I'd probably have spent as long waiting for a gap to take the pub pic as we did in the pub itself.
Anyway, it's narrow, stretching back a fair way from the street with rooms across two floors.  The pub was relocated here in 1887, its previous location being on the other side of the road.

We perused the cask choices at the bar, dismissing the Theakston's 'Old Peculiar; as too disruptive to our ambitious itinerary for the day, then plumping for the Greene King house beer.
The familiar-tasting 3.9% ordinary bitter - not a beer I'm ever going to get excited about, but a half pint, well-kept, was fine to accompany our short visit. 

The toilets (complete with Hertha Berlin sticker on the cistern in the gents) are down some steep narrow stairs to the basement.  No 'mind your head' hazard on this one, but another set of stairs to take care on, especially if you've had a few Old Peculiars.

The original Cock, with it's tales of Samuel Pepys drinking there, was demolished to make way for the Bank of England, as was the neighbouring inn the Haunch of Venison.
The bank swatted aside this pair of taverns as they wanted a new branch to serve the law courts.  They commissioned architect Sir Arthur Blomfield to design a suitable eye-catching building, which was opened in 1888.
As with the Cock - excessive traffic and impatience = picture letdown.

The Old Bank of England (194 Fleet Street, Aldwych, London, EC4A 2LT)
The bank lasted until 1975, had a spell as a building society, then was restored and converted to a pub in 1994.
It does look rather splendid...

This was a Fuller's Ale & Pie house when I visited many years ago.  It's now under the control of Hertfordshire brewery McMullen's.

We opted for the AK original mild.  A beer which McMullen's have brewed continuously since 1827.  At 3.7%, it's at the lighter, less wintery, end of the scale of mild varieties, malty, smooth and easy to drink.

Gareth, the third member of our party, was making his way across the city to the Seven Stars, our next destination.
Which will have to wait for the next post, as this one's gotten far too long.
Thornbridge ales, more Sam Smiths, and the best staircase yet, to follow.