A fine looking gin palace
Drinking heavily has been a skill of the traditional Londoner for many, many centuries. The skimpiest glance through metropolitan history would leave you reeling, with talk of quarts of gin for breakfast, mead for elevenses then a good afternoon’s thirst-slaking, before sharing a few decanters of claret for tea. At times, it can feel like history itself is propelling you towards the bar, especially when most of the world is still at its desk.
This pub is especially adept at such mysterious behaviour, luring in weary pedestrians away from the joyless noise of the City Road. Its fame comes from the nursery rhyme ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’, where the joys of spending all your wages on the pub’s liquor are extolled, to a sprightly melody. And so it is, as you stand at the sturdy bar on a summery afternoon, with lairy City boys and salespeople jostling past, you can feel the surge of history beneath your feet, the catcalls and boasts of your million predecessors filling the air. You can close your eyes and see the scene, standing side-by-side with warehousemen and dockers from days gone by, the only difference between you and them the trifling abstraction of time.
You can allow yourself to ponder such whimsies because if it’s sunny, it takes an age to get served in here. The large pub garden draws us in, the understaffed bar pins us down. We’re still slaves to the drink, in one way or another.