Ep 07 Bloomsbury, What Ales You? Literary Legends & Regal Revelations at The Lamb Conduit Street & The Queen's Larder

Two great pubs in the Bloomsbury area, one with lots of famous patrons and the other with a historical connection to the royals.  Join us for the full story.

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Google map with pubs covered in previous episodes pinned, courtesy of Andy Meddick:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/4/edit?mid=12c-WKa3XiT1qTLydK8psZocUR7Y_Wes&usp=sharing

Or TinyURL: https://tinyurl.com/bduca5dv

The following resources are quoted frequently in these episodes:

• Ted Bruning  -- Historic Pubs of London (ISBN 978-0658005022) and London By Pub (ISBN 978-0658005022)
• Wikipedia
• https://londonspubswherehistoryreallyhappened.wordpress.com/  by Ann Laffeaty

Intro music:

Vivaldi - Spring Allegro byJohn Harrison with the Wichita State University Chamber

Photo: Ewan Munro 

Website: https://historiclondonpubcast.com/

E-mail: hosteric@historiclondonpubcast.com

Transcript

Welcome to this episode of The Historic London Pubcast. I'm Eric Blair, and I'd like to take you on a journey through the rich history of London's iconic pubs. My goal is to share with you my passion for the great old pubs of London. I want to give you some facts to help you appreciate the history of these hallowed establishments mixed in with some fun stories that make it all go down as smooth as a well poured pint. 

Today we travel to the London area known as Bloomsbury, which is east of Russell Square, and The British Museum.Our first pub will be The Lamb. There are several pubs and restaurants in London that have Lamb in their name, so when we speak about the pub, I always say The Lamb Conduit Street.  

The pub and the street's name go back to the actions by Sir William Lamb, a Philanthropist who in 1577 built a conduit to bring clean water to the householders of the quarter and generously supplied 120 pails to the poorest householders to carry it in. But recognition sometimes can take a while. The pub named for him was first reported some 150 years later, in 1720.

It has remained true to the architecture of its Victorian youth. What you see today captures the style of that period, even after subsequent rebuilding. Now, my AALP pub characteristic system (that's Architecture, Antiquity, Legend and People) has the last item (the P for People) on full lit. The Lamb has some famous patrons. Not that The Lamb doesn't do well in the other criteria, but let's first talk about the blokes and birds who used to come here!

We start with good old Charles Dickens. We can always rely on him. Dickens was a patron of the pub from 1837 to 1839. He lived at 48 Doughty Street, which is about two blocks east, and a short four-minute walk from The Lamb. Given his fondness for imbibing, I'm sure he took that walk frequently. He did get some stuff done, though.

While living at 48 Doughty Street, Dickens completed The Pickwick Papers and wrote two new books, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. The pub was also ground zero for The Bloomsbury Group - an assortment of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists from the early 20th Century. Although popularly thought of as a formal group, it really was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with Cambridge University and King's College London who worked or studied together near Bloomsbury.

According to one historian, although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the Arts. They did agree on one other thing, too. They like to drink at The Lamb.Famous folks said to be a part of The Bloomsbury Group are: 

1.       Art Critic Clive Bell. 

2.       Three Post-Impressionist Painters:

·       Vanessa Bell. 

·       Roger Fry.

·       Duncan Grant.

Art Critic and three Modern Painters! Throw in a couple of pints, and there must have been some lively conversation there! 

Other members were:

3.       E.M. Forester, Fiction Writer famous for A Passage to India and A Room With A View. 

4.       John Maynard Keynes, well known Economist. 

5.       Leonard Woolf, Essayist and Nonfiction Writer.

6.       Virginia Woolf Essayist and Fiction Writer (Leonard’s probably more famous wife).

So, as patrons, we're in good company. But wait! londonspubswherehistoryreallyhappened.wordpress.comtells us of two more famous pub goers. Quoting from that Blog, 

“The Lamb was a venue for a Lovers’ Tryst between poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Their union was ill-starred from the beginning. The couple met through their mutual love of poetry and were married four months later, in June 1956. Their only wedding guest was Sylvia's mother. The fact that the mother-in-law and accompanied the couple on their honeymoon should have been an early red flag for Ted! Sylvia was plagued with depression and made several suicide attempts. Unfortunately, she finally succeeded in February 1963. Hughes was devastated. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “That's the end of my life.”  The rest is posthumous. But he then went on to write children's works and penned classical translations, books, essays and several more points before remarrying in 1970 and becoming Poet Laureate of Britain in 1984. He had quite an impressive afterlife.” 

Well, while all that is true, I think we should give a little more credit to what Sylvia accomplished in her short life.

Wiki tells us she is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry, and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems, Ariel, and probably most famously, The Bell Jar - a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. That's a sad tale, and oddly enough, we'll talk about another famous person battling mental illness that is associated with our second pub today.

But that's yet to come. So, what is it about this pub that attracts all these famous people? Let's step inside and see what all the fuss is about. Once again, Bruning’s Historic Pubs of London book provides a well-written description of what we find behind the door,

“The Lamb interior and its glory belong entirely to 1894, when, like so many old London inns, it was lavishly and expensively remodeled. Although the partitions which originally radiated out from the horseshoe shaped bar have almost all been removed, it still retains plenty of other features of the period. Top of the list are its complete set of brilliant cut glass snob screens, arranged at face height so that gentlemen who didn't want to be identified by the staff didn't have to be this many for privacy. Even secrecy seems strange to us, but judging by the number of snob screens which have survived in pubs across central London, it was the norm in the class obsessed Victorian England. Although the patrons which, like the snob screen, separated Man from Master in the days when such things mattered, have gone, the pub is still pleasingly broken up into snug spaces, with a mellow dining room down some steps at the back. Its dark colors, its rich woodwork, brass rails and sepia photographs of society belles of the 1890s are all very much of their time. The Lamb is distinguished by the intimate yet cultured atmosphere of a Victorian Gentlemen's Club or scholarly study. In short, The Lamb has that quality which eludes most pubs, and that is taste.” 

Well, said Ted. 

My last visit there was early 2023. Stepping into The Lamb on that sunny March afternoon was like stepping into a quintessential London scene. The pub buzzed with the warmth of conversation and the clinking of glasses. Late middle-aged gentlemen, the kind you might picture from a Sherlock Holmes story perched on stools and plush armchairs deeply engrossed in conversations fueled by pints of ale. The atmosphere was pure London pub - a timeless haven for regulars and a delightful peek into local life for visitors like myself.

There is an upstairs and, from my recollection, the most outstanding feature is that if you get the window seat, you have a great up-close view of the hanging pub sign and further on down to the street below. Frequent Listeners know that I like to talk occasionally about the companies that run these pubs and their beers. The Lamb is our first Young’s pub that we've covered, so let me provide a bit of information about that company and their products.

The Company was founded as a brewery in 1831 by Charles Young and Anthony Bainbridge when they purchased The Ram Brewery in Wadsworth. Young's claim that the Ram Brewery was the oldest British brewery in continuous operation. By 2006, the brewery was a mix of ancient and ultra-modern plant, including a steam engine which had been installed in 1835 and had been in regular use until the 1980s.

Unfortunately, the company closed the Ram Brewery at that time, and the brewing operation was transferred to a new company, Wells and Young's Brewing, which is a joint brewing venture with Charles Wells Brewery. But change was not all bad. Wells and Young’s Brewery rekindled the production of Courage Imperial Russian Stout, a famous bottled beer with 10% alcohol by volume.

Other beers from Wells and Young include London Original, London Special, London Stout and Double Chocolate Stout, Young's Bitter and Young’s Special London Ale.That last beer, the Special London Ale, is a Pale Ale which was awarded a Gold Medal in the 1999 CAMRA Great British Beer Festival. CAMRA  is The Campaign For Real Ale - a beer and pub affection outdoors group which is 150,000 members strong. Special London Ale was also awarded a Grand Gold Medal in 2010 by the quality advocacy group Monde Selection.

Okay, finish up that pint of Young's London Special and let's get walking. Okay, our second pub today is a five-minute walk west, mostly on Great Ormond Street toward Queen square. Along the way we pass a couple of serious medical facilities - Great Ormond Street Hospital For Children and The National Hospital For Neurology and Neurosurgery. In fact, medical issues play a part in the pub we're about to visit. The Queen's Larder on Queen Square. Full disclosure, the Queen that the pub's name refers to is not the same Queen that the Square is named after. The pub's Queen is Charlotte, wife of George the Third, and the square is named for Queen Anne, who ruled about six decades before George from 1707 to 1714.

The sign in front of the pub does a nice job of giving us a thumbnail history. The earliest reference to the tavern was a deed drawn up in 1710. The tavern then was a simple ale house without an inside, so it closed. You didn't have to go home, but you couldn't stay there. In the late 1700s, the ruling King George the Third began to be affected by mental illness and for a while stayed privately in Queen Square under the care of a Doctor Willis. The Doctor's treatment was temporarily successful. George's wife, Queen Charlotte, was helpful in the King's recovery. She rented a small underground cellar beneath the present tavern, in which she stored special delicacies for her sick husband. When the ale house became a tavern later in George's reign, it was named The Queen's Larder in Charlotte's honor.

Perhaps some of our non-British Listeners might not be familiar with the term, ‘Larder.’ It is defined as a room or a large cupboard for storing food. I think most of us would agree that it's synonymous with the term, ‘Pantry.’ The sign concludes with a couple of sentences about the surrounding area. The Queen's Larder stands in a neighborhood that is famous for its hospitals and foundling home.

A writer once observed that the area seemed to have been set aside for the “Humanities of life and the alleviation of all our destinies.” 

Before we enter the pub, let's talk a little bit about George and Charlotte. Since they are an integral part of this pub's history, George the Third was King from 1760 until his death in 1820.

At the time of his death, he was the longest lived and longest reigning British Monarch, having reigned for over 59 years. He remains the longest reigning male Monarch in British history. George married the German Princess Charlotte about a year after becoming King, in September of 1761. George never took a mistress, and the couple enjoyed a happy marriage until his mental illness struck.

They had 15 children, nine sons and six daughters. George had lots of things happen during his reign: The Seven Years War, the loss of the North American colonies, and the defeat of Napoleon, among other things. But none of that is relative to The Queen's Larder. What is relative is that George's health declined in the late 1780s. I have been unable to confirm the date the Queen put the storage unit in place, or when the pub adopted the official name, The Queen's Larder but one source indicated that George began treatment in 1788. So that gives us an idea. The Blog   londonspubswherehistoryreallyhappened.wordpress.comgives us a glimpse into George's symptoms and it's not pretty, 

“He would speak randomly at length until he began frothing at the mouth. He frequently talked to trees and also howled like a dog. He suffered from convulsions so severe that the servants were forced to sit on him to keep him still. Queen Charlotte refused to be alone with him after his first bout of madness, mainly because he would hug her very tightly and refuse to let her go.”

There is still a debate as to the cause of his illness. For years it was thought to be solely a mental condition until more recently. In the 1960s, researchers began to think that he suffered from a disease called Porphyria.But that theory has been reduced to just a possibility by more recent work. In short, we don't know. The Blog Writer Anne Lafferty sums it up like this, 

“Whatever the diagnosis, he was definitely box of frogs mad. Poor George's mental battles continued for three decades, with ups and downs in his condition until his death in 1820.”

Okay, King George's situation is kind of a downer. Let's pop into the pub to lighten up and have a bit of refreshment. The pub itself is a labyrinth of worn wooden beams and low ceilings. Gleaming brass lamps cast a warm glow on the mismatched furniture. Plump armchairs huddle around low tables while high backed wooden stools line the worn bar counter. Worn tapestries and framed prints of old London scenes adorn the wall.

The clientele is a colorful blend. Typically, a scene might be a group of young professionals huddled in a corner, their faces illuminated by the glow of a laptop screen in animated debate. At the bar, a couple in their twilight years share a quiet drink, their hands clasped together. Across the room a group of boisterous friends erupt in laughter after a particularly well-told joke. In short, a nice mix. 

The pub feels surprisingly cozy. The warmth, furniture and slightly uneven floorboards all contribute to a sense of history and lived in comfort. You can practically feel the echoes of countless conversations and laughter that have filled this space over the years. There's an upstairs, but I prefer to stay downstairs unless it becomes too crowded.

This is a very well-regarded establishment. Ms. Lafferty, the pub Blog Writer, identifies it as one of her Top 20 Pubs. I agree. In fact, let me add a personal note here. My pub crawl buddy and I have a practice of voting for the best pub we visit during our annual crawls. We call this, ‘The Moon Under Water Prize.’

We took the name from an essay published in 1946, in The Evening Standard newspaper.It was written by noted Author and avid pub crawler George Orwell. In the essay Orwell discusses the characteristics of what he considers the perfect pub, and he gives that pub a name, The Moon Under Water. We don't use his criteria, but we have taken the name for our little evaluation game. 

In 2023, The Queen's Larder won our prize. No small feat because we visit quite a few pubs in a week. Of course it's a great pub, but there are lots of great pubs. But when we went on a sunny Sunday afternoon it was not too crowded, and they were playing some very enjoyable smooth jazz on the stereo at the proper volume.

We just seem to have the perfect pub experience there. And hey, maybe it was due to some luck with the lack of crowding and the choice of music volume. But, you know, that is the nature of The Moon Under Water Prize. I invite you and your friends to consider this little exercise if you visit several establishments. We find it a lot of fun.

By the way, the pub company Wetherspoons has several pubs in the London area that they've named The Moon Under Water. They are relatively new pubs, and I visited the one off of Leicester Square. It's a nice pub, but as of yet it hasn't won The Moon Under Water prize. 

So now, feeling a bit better with a pint under our belt, we've come to the end of another Pubcast episode. Thank you for listening and please be sure to check out our next Episode. Cheers!