The Olde Wine Shades, LondonThe Olde Wine Shades
- Best time
- A weekday evening — this is the City, and the lanes empty at weekends
- Getting there
- A short walk from Monument or Cannon Street, down a lane most people never turn into
Why it’s in the log
Built in 1663, three years before the Great Fire, and the only building here with a serious argument for having come through it. Even that gets hedged — the standard phrasing is that it "somehow" survived, which is honest, because nobody can quite explain how a house in Martin Lane escaped when the streets around it did not.
It began as a merchant's house rather than a pub, and like other substantial riverside properties of its day it was built with a tunnel running down to the Thames. Bomb damage in 1940 forced the tunnel to be sealed, but its entrance is still visible in the wall if you know to look. The building is Grade II listed.
Known for a long time as El Vino, it was bought by Davy's in 2015 and refurbished in 2017, which reopened the cellar bar to the public. It is a wine house rather than a beer pub, and reads more like a dining room than a bar — worth knowing before you arrive wanting a pint.
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Cittie of Yorke
London, United KingdomA drinking house on this spot since about 1430, in a building from the 1920s — plus a Dylan Thomas poem that stayed lost for sixty years.
Gordon's Wine Bar
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Hoop and Grapes
London, United KingdomA leaning late-seventeenth-century timber house that Historic England calls a type once common in London and now very rare.
