Cittie of Yorke, LondonCittie of Yorke
- Best time
- Early evening, and sit in the back room
- Getting there
- On High Holborn, a minute from Chancery Lane station
Why it’s in the log
The claim here is about the ground rather than the building, and the pub is unusually straightforward about it: there has been a drinking house on this site since roughly 1430, and what stands now is a reconstruction of the 1920s. That gives it one of the youngest buildings in this collection and one of the oldest licences — the exact inverse of most of its neighbours.
The reconstruction is the reason to go. The back room, Henneky's Long Bar, is a tall hall-like space with a row of Victorian-style cubicles down one side and a triangular late-Georgian stove standing free in the middle of the floor, vented underneath because it has no chimney. The pub is Grade II listed, on CAMRA's National Inventory, and run by Samuel Smith's, which keeps the prices well below what the postcode would suggest.
The literary footnote beats most. Dylan Thomas dashed off an ode to the place when it was still called Henneky's Long Bar, and the poem was unknown until 2014, when Fred Jarvis — a former general secretary of the National Union of Teachers — came across it in his late parents-in-law's papers.
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Part of
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