Fittingly, for a pub in the heart of Fleet Street – once the centre of the tabloid newspaper industry, whose hacks would never let the truth stand in the way of a good story – Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese is a repository of tales that may have grown in the telling.
Was this Samuel Johnson’s favoured pub? Well, there’s no actual record of the seventeenth-century polymath’s ever visiting the place, but his “favourite chait” is nonetheless installed in a corner, beneath a slightly dyspeptic portrait of the man.
Did the establishment once boast a grey parrot named Polly who could swear like a navvy? Yes – he was a fixture for four decades before dying in 1926, and his taxidermic figure now watches over the Chop Room – but whether he could also imitate the popping of a cork, followed by the “glug glug glug” as the wine was poured, and whether he repeated this feat so many times during Armistice Day in 1918 that he fainted from the exertion, are matters of purest conjecture.
What’s indisputable is that the “Ye Olde” bit of the pub’s name is more than mere hyperbole; witness the “rebuilt 1667* legend on its sign (the original wooden sixteenth-century structure having succumbed to the Great Fire) or the list of sixteen monarchs who’ve reigned in England since the pub’s existence, displayed to the right of the entrance.
But witness, also, the labyrinth within. Authentically scuffed corridors and precipitous stairwells lead up, down, right and left, anterooms are nestled within larger salons, and lowering ceilings lead to echoing caverns. You can work here for months, as the current barman has done, and still not be sure that you’ve ventured into every nook and cranny.
The vaulted heights of the Cellar Bar indicate its previous use as a thirteenth-century Carmelite monastery, while the series of bawdy seventeenth-century tiles that once adorned an upstairs fireplace and have now been packed off to the Museum of London (“they were more saucy postcard than dark web, according to one of those who got an eyeful) suggest that part of the building may once have been a brothel.
A heritage of contemplation and/or sensual pleasure; no wonder that the Cheshire Cheese has proved so congenial for writers, from Dickens (“he took him down Ludgate-hill to Fleet Street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern with a good plain dinner and good wine”, from A Tale of Two Cities) to P. G. Wodehouse (*Yesterday, I looked in at the Garrick at lunch time, took one glance of loathing at the mob, and went off to lunch by myself at the Cheshire Cheese,” from A Life in Letters), not to mention the less celebrated contributors to the pub’s collection of leather-bound visitors’ books, which date back to the Victorian era, and feature many poems that venture to rhyme “Cheese” with “ease”.
The Cheshire Cheese exhibits all the creaks, groans, crackles and booms of a venerable chunk of living history, right down to the basement chills (the recent removal of a manhole cover revealed a gurgling remnant of the River Fleet, one of London’s legendary lost livers) and up to the roaring hearths (the fires have been known to be lit right through the tepid English summer).
What saves it from becoming a kind of pewter-tankard museum piece is the singular sense of refuge it continues to offer. “A push at the door, and I have passed into another world, ” wrote the artist Joseph Pennell in Harper’s Weekly in 1887. You’ll no longer be provided with a free pipe and tobacco on entering, and you’ll be nursing a pint of Samuel Smith’s Organic Lager rather than a Jug of mead. Even the hacks have long since departed the area.
But the Cheshire Cheese rolls on, its assortment of walls absorbing yet more gossip and debate, concord and dispute, as successive waves of patrons put the outside world to rights. After all, there are always new stories to tell.
