OLD inns in London may perhaps owe their repute to the share they have in the scenery of Pickwick and Nickleby. The London inns and inn-yards, still used as houses of entertainment, are among the last few survivals which link us to the antique customs of old London. These are now being swept away with a pitiless rapidity, and in a dozen years more not one will be left. The enormous, sheltering, tiled roofs, the galleries, balustrades, crannies, winding stairs, joined to make these singular structures picturesque, with their lights and shadows, suggestive of the buildings in an old Normandy town. The strange part is that these hostelries seem to do business up to the moment of their extinction; and even when that occurs, the traffic is transferred to a parasite public-house bearing the same name. In most cases, however, the tradition of its being a halt or starting place for carriers and country waggons is maintained, as the great railway companies have seized on many to serve as their goods depots. Hence we find the Bricklayers’ Arms and such places, from under whose archways now rumble forth the Pickford vans, instead of the favourite “Mouldy’s Iron Devil,” the six or eight-horse waggon of our grandsires. The old inns were frail and precarious structures; and it is a marvel that they should have survived so long, the vast expanse of tiled roof being warped and bent in eddying waves, while the crazy stairs and galleries of ancient wood were rotten with age. Many of the Dickens inns were in the City, notably the one in which Mr. Squeers put up when he used to repair to London to collect victims for his school. Mr. Squeers’s house, with many other curious places, was swept away when Snow Hill was abolished, and the Holborn Viaduct carried through to Newgate Street.

Two picturesque specimens—the “Old Tabard,” in the Borough, and the “Warwick Arms,” close to Paternoster Row, would have found admirers in Nuremberg or Rouen. The latter was a remarkable specimen from its size and elaborateness, with its huge roof, rambling galleries and crannies, cavernous dark shadows, and general air of mystery. The tiled roofs of these buildings seemed to grow bent and warped from age and weakness, and fall into those wavings and twists which form an element of the picturesque. The wood of the balustrades grew black and grimed; it was strange that what appeared so crazy should have held together so long. The “Tabard,” though it did not date from Chaucer’s day, as many innocently fancied, was a genuine structure of the seventeenth century. The wonder, in truth, is that any of these fragile structures should still be in existence. Perhaps the most remarkable and most interesting of the old inn-yards was that of the “Four Swans,” which stood till some eight or ten years ago in Bishopsgate Street. This was considered the most perfect and best preserved of all, having more galleries, and having been the scene of a stirring adventure during the Roundhead and Cavalier wars. Its neighbour, the “Green Dragon,” was levelled about the same time. What a pleasing twang, it may be said, is there about the titles of these hostelries, which contrast with the more prosaic designations of latter-day life!

Of these old inns, with their yards and galleries, there are but two or three in which the business of entertainment is still carried on. There is the old “Bell Inn,” a grimed, caked, red-brick, ancient building, with its sign of the Bell, a china shop in front, and an archway according to the old pattern. Entering, there is the true old-world flavour—the galleries, the tumble-down stairs fashioned of wood-panelling with projecting eaves, the files of bells outside, the kitchen to the left as in a foreign hotel, strange little rickety stairsteps as from the cabin of a ship, with also the occasional appearance of a figure in one of the galleries. The inn life here, from these arrangements, is certain to correspond—every one is, as it were, in evidence. You can hardly dream of the noisy Holborn just outside. It is very different in the regular hostelries, where everything is at the top of the house or at the bottom, not, as here, all round about it. London has many of these quaint surprises to those who wish to see them. Here is to be seen the low arch, under which the coaches and waggons drove into the inn-yard, with its galleries running round, from which chambermaids looked down or called to those below. Even now it seems a strange order of things and a quaint arrangement, and you wonder how business is carried on at such places.

It is, however, when we cross London Bridge and enter the Borough that we come to the region of inn-yards. Here began the road to Canterbury, and here, in the old times, the waggons and coaches arrived with their goods and passengers; and we are at once struck with the innumerable yards and small inclosures into which these vehicles used to drive. There were a large number of these inns, most of which remain in some shape, surviving at least as public-houses. There were the old “King’s Head,” the old “White Hart,” the new “White Hart,” the “Old George,” the “Queen’s Head,” the “Nag’s Head,” and the “Spur.” Few only of the old pattern remain, and their days, or hours in one case, are certainly numbered. The first is the old “King’s Head,” of which a fragment—some thirty or forty yards long—still stands all ruinous and forlorn, with its two ancient galleries or balustrades in a sadly tottering state, its anatomy exposed in a heartless fashion at each end. One could be sentimental and mournful over it. It is surrounded by new spick and span brickwork, and a new “King’s Head” insolently confronts it and seems to flourish.

“In the Borough,” says the author of “Pickwick,” “there still remain some half-a-dozen old inns which have preserved their external features unchanged. Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries and passages and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories. It was in the yard of one of these inns—of no less celebrated a one than the ‘White Hart,’ that a man was employed in brushing the dirt off a pair of boots:” the introduction as the world knows, of Mr. Pickwick to the immortal Samuel Weller. The yard is then described: “It presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual characteristics of a large coach inn. Three or four lumbering waggons, each with a pile of goods beneath its ample canopy about the height of a second-floor window of an ordinary house, were stowed away beneath a lofting which extended over one end of the yard; and another, which was to commence its journey in the morning, was drawn out into an open space. A double tier of bedroom galleries with old clumsy balustrades ran round two sides of the straggling area, and a double row of bells to correspond, sheltered from the weather by a little sloping roof, hung over the door leading to the bar and coffee-room. Two or three gigs or chaise-carts were wheeled up under different little sheds and pent-houses.”

The guests, it would appear, slept in rooms giving on the galleries all round; for, we are told, “a loud ringing of one of the bells was followed by the appearance of a smart chambermaid in the upper sleeping gallery, who after tapping at one of the doors and receiving a request from within, called over the balustrade” to Sam. Presently the “bustling landlady of the ‘White Hart’ made her appearance in the opposite gallery, and after a little vituperation, flung a pair of lady’s shoes into the yard and bustled away.”

It is curious to think that this scene was a description of what was going on about fifty years ago, and was kept up for many years after “Pickwick” was written. The picture of that morning—the chambermaid coming out of the room in the gallery, the landlady throwing the boots down to Sam—still rises before us as we turn into the yard. Two sides of the inclosure now remain, but it shows how imposing an establishment must have been the house that in Dickens’s time would be called “the celebrated ‘White Hart Inn.’” The huge tiled roof is there, and the double tiers of galleries, with the doors of the guests’ chambers. But a wooden shed has been built round the lower portion, close to where Sam stood and was questioned by Mr. Perker and Mr. Wardle. Clothes-lines hang across the galleries, and a few years ago squalid women could be seen looking down and surveying the intruders, just as the chambermaid and landlady looked down upon Mr. Weller. A waggon lies up in ordinary in the corner, as it did in Dickens’s day. The whole is black, grimed, rusty, and decayed, and fills the mind with a sort of melancholy, as things “fallen from their high estate” do. By the right rises a flight of stairs leading to the gallery, close to which is a quaint, short balcony. Such is the old “White Hart,” or all that is left of it, which, however, still accommodates a certain number of tenants. On the other side is the newer “White Hart,” with its long row of glass windows, seeming a comfortable place enough.[17]

Our next halt is at the “George,” which has really a bright and

bustling air of business. It is a not unpicturesque courtyard from its very irregularity, the old wooden galleries being alternated with buildings of a different pattern, some projecting forward. The galleries are gay with paint and plenty of flowers; and altogether one might seem able to take one’s ease in one’s inn here very fairly. Even more picturesque is the “Queen’s Head,” a little lower down, a very effective gathering of irregular buildings. It has its two galleries on the left, but another portion has been boarded in for greater room and comfort. A tall archway in the centre block offers a De Hooghe-like glimpse of another court beyond, while a bow-windowed bar-parlour has been built out in front, and suggests a Captain Cuttle flavour. Here, too, is the heavy tiled roof, over which rises a little peaked cupola, not without effect. One hardly hears the hum of the Borough without. Who “puts up” at these places? What sort of “entertainment for man or beast” is there? How long do the guests stay? These are questions of high mystery. The people who dwell here must have ways of their own, and be influenced by the dispensations under which they abide. This conversing from aloft, with occasional pausing to look down and see what is going on, lends a sort of vitality to what would otherwise be a sleepy and antiquated kind of existence. To this old arrangement, as is well known, it is that we owe the form of our theatres. The old inn-yard being a favourite place of entertainment, the guests would gather in the galleries to look over; the floor suggested the later pit; while the stage was set up, facing the archway, at the far end.

In Covent Garden, under Inigo Jones’s loggia, are found some old inns of a thoroughly Pickwickian sort, with the bars and snuggeries which are fitting background for a gathering of Dickens’s men and women. These are “The Tavistock” and “The Bedford,” in high favour with country bachelors. They must be as old almost as the colonnade itself; while the “Bedford Coffee House” has quite a history of its own, resplendent with the names of Churchill, Hogarth, the steak-ordering Duke of Norfolk, and many a son of fame besides. Still flourishes also the “Hummums,” where Parson Ford saw the ghost, as described by Dr. Johnson; but it has been rebuilt.

On the top of Hampstead Heath, and situated in a most picturesque spot, is “Jack Straw’s Castle,” a little inn which has a reputation of its own. ’Tis said to be the highest point in the quarter, and though so close to town, has an antique and truly rustic air. The pleasant Hampstead mornings, with the keen air of those northern heights, the glimpses of cheerful old red-brick houses, the vicinity of Church Row, one of the most effective “bits” of old brick architecture in the country, the delightful undulations of the Heath, all make “Jack Straw’s Castle” a most acceptable hostelry, though John Sadleir was found hard by, with his silver poison cup lying some yards away. Readers of Forster’s “Life of Dickens” will recall the many rides of the novelist, accompanied by his “trusty” friend, to this inn, and the pleasant tÊte-À-tÊte dinners that followed. Indeed, a pleasant volume might be made on “The History of Old Inns, and Those who Frequented Them.” One of the most famous is of course the “Red Lion” at Henley, where Johnson and Boswell stayed—Johnson, indeed, had a particular predilection for taverns. He was one of their most ardent votaries; he remains their most eloquent apologist. In the inn at Chapel-house, after “triumphing over the French for not having in any perfection the tavern life,” he went on to enlarge upon them in a discourse which has become historical. “There is no private house,” he declared, “in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire that every body should be easy; in the nature of things it cannot be: there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests; the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man, but a very impudent dog indeed, can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome; and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced, as by a good tavern or inn.” Thus did he discourse to Boswell; while to Hawkins he asserted that a tavern chair is the throne of human felicity.