London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- History -- 1800-1950
was scarcely recognisable. There are various views of the old inn in
the Crace collection: one without date, one of 1780, another of 1810,
another of 1812 (the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ print), one of 1831, and yet
another of 1841. The site is now occupied by a public-house in the
gin-palace style, which presumes to call itself the Old Tabard.
In Piccadilly, No. 75, there formerly stood on part of the site for so
short a time occupied by Clarendon House (1664-1683) the Three Kings
tavern. At the gateway to the stables there were seen two Corinthian
pilasters, which originally belonged to Clarendon House. The stable-yard
itself presented the features of the old galleried inn-yard, and it was
the place from which the first Bath mail-coach was started. Later, Mr.
John Camden Hotten, and afterwards Messrs. Chatto and Windus, carried on
their publishing business on this spot.
In the seventeenth century the Three Nuns was the sign of a well-known
coaching and carriers’ inn in Aldgate, which gave its name to Three Nuns
Court close by. The yard, as usual, was galleried, but within recent
years the inn was pulled down and rebuilt in the form of a modern hotel.
Near this inn was the dreadful pit in which, during the Plague of 1665,
not less than 1,114 bodies were buried in a fortnight, from September 6
to 20.
The Criterion Restaurant and Theatre stands on the site of an old inn,
the White Bear, which for a century and more was one of the busiest
coaching-houses in connection with the West and South-West of England.
In this house Benjamin West, the future President of the Royal Academy,
put up on his arrival in London from America. Here died Luke Sullivan,
the engraver of some of Hogarth’s most famous works. The inn yard had
galleries to two sides of the bedchambers on the second floor, connected
by a bridge across.
We must once more return to Southwark, for besides the inns already
mentioned as existing in that locality, there was another famous one,
namely, the White Hart. It had the largest inn sign except the Castle in
Fleet Street. Much maligned Jack Cade and some of his followers put up
at this inn during their brief possession of London in 1450. The
original inn which sheltered them remained standing till 1676, when it
was burnt down in the great fire already mentioned. It was rebuilt, and
was in existence till a few years ago, when it was pulled down. It
consisted of several open courts, the inner one having handsome
galleries on three sides to the first and second floors. There are two
views of it, taken respectively in 1840 and 1853, in the Crace
collection, and it was in the yard of this inn that Mr. Pickwick first
encountered Sam Weller.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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