The Swan on the Hop was an inn of Edward III.’s time; it stood eastward of
Drury Lane and on the south side of Holborn.[652]
The White Hart is described in Henry VIII.’s time as possessing eighteen
acres of pasture. It stood near the Holborn end of Drury Lane, and existed
till 1720. In Aggas’s Plan it appears surrounded on three sides by a wall.
It was bounded on the east by Little Queen Street, and was divided from
Holborn by an embankment. A court afterwards stood on its site.
The Rose is mentioned as early as Edward III.’s reign. It was near
Lewknor’s Lane, and stood not far from the White Hart.
The Vine was an inn till 1816. It was on the north side of Holborn, a
little to the east of Kingsgate Street. It is supposed to have stood on
the site of a vineyard mentioned in Doomsday Book. It was originally a
country roadside inn, with fields at the back. It became an infamous
nuisance. The house that replaced it was first occupied by a
timber-merchant, and afterwards by Probert, the accomplice of Thurtell,
who, escaping death for the murder of Mr. Weare, was soon after hanged for
horse-stealing in Gloucestershire. It was at this trial that the
prisoner’s keeping a gig was adduced as an incontestible proof of his
respectability--a fact immortalised, almost to the weariness of a
degenerate age, by Mr. Thomas Carlyle. The inn was once called the
Kingsgate Tavern, from its having stood near the king’s gate or turnpike
in the adjoining street.
The Cock and Pye Inn stood at the west corner of what was once a mere or
marshland. The fields surrounding it, now Seven Dials, were called from
it the Cock and Pye Fields.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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