Literary Pubs in London: Where Dickens, Orwell and Yeats's Poets Drank

Few pubs can claim to have christened a neighbourhood, yet this Charlotte Street corner did exactly that. It began as a coffee house, was a pub by the mid-19th century, and in time lent its name to Fitzrovia itself. Its reputation rests on the writers and artists who gathered here: George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, the painter Augustus John and Nina Hamnett, the artist sometimes remembered as the queen of bohemia, are all woven into its story. The ground floor keeps its traditional furnishings and restored interiors, and every beer comes from Samuel Smith's in Tadcaster, with Old Brewery Bitter drawn from oak casks in the cellar. These days the room fills with students, media people, locals and visitors rather than poets on their uppers. Make it your first stop, early in the evening, when there is space to sit with a pint and picture the district that grew up around its name.

Phones stay in pockets on Dean Street. The compact bar is hung with photographs, and there is no music, no television and no machines to compete with the talk, which is precisely the point. Its long-standing crowd runs to writers, artists, actors and film people, plus a scattering of bohemians and wide-eyed first-timers, and wine comes before beer here, with thirty champagnes and wines by the glass. Upstairs, a small dining room cooks a menu that changes with the day; warm madeleines with lemon curd are the noted finish. Stop for one glass and a proper conversation. Of all four, this is the room that most feels like the literary pub of legend, mainly because it refuses everything that would get in the way of one.

Down Wine Office Court, a slit of an alley off Fleet Street, a sign records that the building was rebuilt in 1667 after the Great Fire, on a site that had held a pub since 1538. Inside it is dim, low and gloriously confusing: old panelled rooms either side of the entrance with fixed benches and big fireplaces, lit in winter, then stairs down to vaulted cellars and up to further bars. The literary record is unusually thick. A plaque in the court says Dickens worked from the pub while producing All the Year Round, and the Cheese is alluded to in A Tale of Two Cities. From 1890 the Rhymers' Club, the poets' circle founded by W.B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys, met here; Yeats later called them "Companions of the Cheshire Cheese". Agatha Christie even sent Poirot to dine. Aim for mid-afternoon or a dark November evening, take a bench by the fire, and look out for Polly, the notoriously foul-mouthed parrot whose stuffed body is still on show.

Step off Borough High Street into the cobbled yard and the reason to come is right above you: two tiers of timber galleries, the lower on cantilevered beams, the upper on wooden Doric columns, the woodwork visibly warped with age. Rebuilt in 1676–77 after fire swept Southwark, this is London's last galleried coaching inn, and only its south wing survives, after railway companies pulled down the rest in the 1870s and 1880s. The National Trust has owned it since 1937. Dickens names the George in Little Dorrit, and a plaque at the High Street entrance says as much. Inn yards like this served as theatres before playhouses existed, and Elizabethan plays are still staged here each year, mostly by amateur companies. On big match days the courtyard leans towards football, so head inside, into the maze of small rooms and creaking stairs, or upstairs to the panelled rooms if they are open, and finish the night where London's stories were once performed.