From the Author of the Internationally Bestselling Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel, What Caesar did for My Salad, Shaggy Dogs, They Laughed at Galileo: The pub was once described by seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys as the ‘heart of England while the church is its soul’. These days I would say he …
Although many traditional pub names came about hundreds of years ago and need a bit of explaining, the world’s most famous bar is called, quite simply, Harry’s Bar, which sounds straightforward enough but there’s a quite a story behind it even so. The name has caught on, too: every Harry’s Bar you walk into throughout …
The Blind Beggar – Thirteenth-century earl who went from riches to rags There are very few Blind Beggar pubs in Great Britain, which is not too surprising as it’s hardly the most appealing of names. Except to goths and bikers, that is: the Blind Beggar pub in Edinburgh is devoted just to them. The original Blind …
There is only one public house by this name, on Broadwick Street in the heart of Soho, and it commemorates a local doctor, one John Snow (1813–58), who managed to save thousands of lives through his quick thinking. In the mid nineteenth century, London had a vast and growing population and yet no proper sanitation. …
St George was not England’s first patron saint, he was adopted by Edward III around 1340 when the king dedicated the chapel he was building at Windsor to the soldier saint who represented the knightly virtues of chivalry he so admired. Much of the rise in popularity of the legend of St George arose during …
