About This Event

**Six Hundred Years, Five Pubs, One Mile** An afternoon walk through the oldest drinking rooms in London One has been pouring beer on the same spot since 1430. Another was built by a bishop in 1546 and is hidden down an alley so well that people walk past it for years. A third opened in 1602, watched the Great Fire take most of the city in 1666, and is still open on a Tuesday. We're walking between them on a Saturday afternoon. **The route, in the order we walk it** **The Princess Louise, High Holborn. Built 1891.** The finest surviving Victorian pub interior in London, and we are starting with it because there is no sensible argument for saving it. The bar is carved up by etched glass and dark carved wood into a series of separate stalls, each one a small private room with its own bit of counter. It looks like a set of extremely ornate confessionals that happen to serve beer. Those partitions were ripped out of almost every pub in Britain during the twentieth century in the name of openness. These ones were put back. **Cittie of Yorke, High Holborn.** A pub here since 1430. Six minutes east. The current building is a 1920s reconstruction, so it is technically an ancient pub doing an impression of a slightly less ancient pub, which is somehow more medieval rather than less. The back bar is a soaring great hall with a trussed roof, Gothic windows, an iron stove of genuinely alarming size, and a row of wooden cubicles down one side. It looks like the dining hall of a minor Oxford college that has given up on scholarship entirely. Closed Sundays. **Ye Olde Mitre, Ely Court. Founded 1546.** Built by the Bishop of Ely for the staff of his palace next door, and hidden down a passage off Hatton Garden that looks exactly like a service entrance for a jeweller. It is regularly described as the hardest pub in London to find. If you are standing in an alley wondering whether you have made a mistake, you are about ten feet from the door. Inside: tiny panelled rooms, a proper sn

Staying overnight?

Hotels within walking distance of Holborn Station.

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