Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
Just the sort of rambling, low-ceilinged tavern you imagine London is full of (and was, once), it was built behind Fleet Street in the wake of the Great Fire in 1666; steady log fires and regularly strewn sawdust make it smell like it’s still burning. In later generations, it played regular host to Dr. Samuel J ...
Just the sort of rambling, low-ceilinged tavern you imagine London is full of (and was, once), it was built behind Fleet Street in the wake of the Great Fire in 1666; steady log fires and regularly strewn sawdust make it smell like it’s still burning. In later generations, it played regular host to Dr. Samuel Johnson (who lived behind on Gough Square), Charles Dickens (who refers to it in A Tale of Two Cities), Yeats, Wilde, and Thackeray. You can get pretty well thackered yourself today: There are six drinking rooms, including a warren of cellar rooms (pictured above) that can feel particularly haunted and secluded, but the cozy front bar—of pallid light, candles in the fireplace, and antique paintings of dead fish—is the most magical. Observe the stuffed carcass of Polly the Parrot, enshrined above the bar since 1926: Her “adept use of profanity would have put any golfer to shame,” according to her obituary in the New York American. Note: Don’t confuse this place with the Victorian-era Cheshire Cheese pub at Temple.
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