THE CHANCERY

THE CHANCERY - A LITERARY LONDON PUB

Nicky and Roy married in Bromley Civic Centre on Saturday afternoon. Afterwards guests, such as Jean , Jo ?, Jude , Ross and I, went on to the reception at this pub.

The Chancery, a Victorian gastropub, used to be called the Oakhill Tavern . Downstairs there is a main U-shaped bar serving three bar areas. We were in the function room upstairs.

The wedding invite told us: ‘to eat, drink and be merry and to endure excruciating speeches.’ We ate from a buffet provided. We drank: Nicky was on Peroni , Roy the Proper Job , Jean and Ross drank wine, Jo a G&T, while Jude and I drank Amstel . The speeches weren’t excruciating. We all were very merry!

William Holdsworth was a legal historian born in Beckenham in 1871. In his book Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (1928), he argued that historians should pay closer attention to the novels of Charles Dickens as source material about the workings of English law and legal institutions; it contains an analysis of Dickens’s novel??Bleak House as an examination of the Chancery system. The novel attacked England's Court of Chancery, where cases and legal procedures take decades to resolve.

The Oakhill Tavern was given a name check on page 230 of Richard Hernaman Allen’s ?novel The Body in the Marine Buildings .

The Chancery, 90 Bromley Road, Beckenham BR3 5NP

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