Literary London

Where the books were written, set, sold, printed and buried: from the Globe to the graves, the bookshops to the presses.

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Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

The Fleet Street chophouse of 1667 that Johnson, Dickens, Twain and Conan Doyle all drank in.

PubsGo inside

Photo by David, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rebuilt straight after the Great Fire, with a warren of dark rooms and cellars going down to a thirteenth-century crypt, sawdust on the floors, and a chair by the fire that Dr Johnson is supposed to have sat in, since he lived round the corner. Dickens is on firmer ground: he was a regular, and the Fleet Street tavern of A Tale of Two Cities is generally taken to be this one. Yeats's Rhymers' Club met upstairs in the 1890s; Twain, Conan Doyle, Chesterton and Wodehouse came; and a parrot called Polly, who lived in the bar for forty years, had her death announced on the BBC in 1926.

Where
145 Fleet Street, EC4A 2BU
Nearest station
City Thameslink · 3 min walk

Hours

Monday12:00 – 23:00
Tuesday12:00 – 23:00
Wednesday12:00 – 23:00
Thursday12:00 – 23:00
Friday12:00 – 23:00
Saturday12:00 – 23:00
Sunday12:00 – 22:30

Hours from the page that lists them, checked 5 September 2026.

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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