YE OLDE LONDON
YE OLDE LONDON - A LITERARY LONDON PUB
Literary Hub informs us ‘Ye olde’ is a pseudo-archaic term; no one ever actually said ‘ye olde’ except in imitation of an imagined speech of the distant past.
When I visited ‘Ye Olde London’, there were hanging baskets out the front and a chalkboard (with ‘Est. 1749’ written on it) on entry. Previously there was a coffee shop (est. 1749) on the site this Greene King pub now occupies. It was identified as the “Coffee House on Ludgate Hill’ by Charles Dickens in?Little Dorrit. The pub is mentioned in?The Dickensian (Volume 22).
The coffee house was frequented by Benjamin Franklin (Bibliography), Joseph Priestley (Bibliography) and James Boswell (Major works). Boswell recorded in 1772 that the customers: ‘… composed principally of Physicians, dissenting Clergy, and Masters of academies.’ The coffee shop closed in 1867.
The tables in the front window at Ye Olde London were all taken with people with wheeled suitcases (presumably tourists rather than physicians, clergy or academics) so I went downstairs to check out the second bar. The first thing I noticed was the fake bookcases outside the toilets - yuck! However, downstairs there were plenty of seats, a pool table (near the back) and an external courtyard (tables, chairs and scaffold poles). I went back upstairs and sat at a table that had become free – a good move as it was nice to sit drinking a pint of Fresh Legs Golden Ale in the natural light at the front of the pub.
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The novelist Michael Knaggs must be a big fan of the pub. He described it in detail on page 153 of his novel Catalyst like this: David Gerrard and Jo Cottrell sat in the warm sunshine with their drinks outside the pub on Ludgate Hill. The Ye Olde London was a traditional English public house with a lively bar at ground level and a further extensive bar downstairs, plus external courtyard popular with patrons for outside drinking and dining. The street frontage was mainly of leaded glass with the pub sign above in large gold letters on a bright red background. The half a dozen hanging baskets were a riot of colour at the very peak pf their seasonal splendour. Then, David and Jo are back, on page 95 of Lost Souls: The courtyard of the Ye Olde London public house on Ludgate Hill was bathed in warm sunshine. The tables were filling rapidly and many of the diners wore shorts and light tops or vests, lending a mid-summer feel to an end-of-summer day. Jo wore a short, yellow, off the shoulder dress and David a cream lightweight linen suit over a pale blue tee shirt. “Do you remember the first time we came here? She asked him. “You ask me that every time we come here,” David said.
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