Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, LondonYe Olde Cheshire Cheese
- Best time
- Any hour — there is almost no natural light to lose
- Getting there
- Down Wine Office Court, an alley off Fleet Street that is easy to walk straight past
Why it’s in the log
The Cheese is one of the few on Fleet Street whose advertised date and actual date agree: it was rebuilt immediately after the Great Fire of 1666, and the warren of low, dark, sawdust-floored rooms you walk into is that building. It is Grade II listed and on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors — the register that matters, because it lists interiors that genuinely survive rather than ones that merely look old.
It is also where London's most repeated pub legend was manufactured. The pub trades hard on Samuel Johnson, whose house stands round the corner at 17 Gough Square, and there is no record of Johnson ever setting foot in it. The association traces to a Johnson Club supper on 13 December 1892, where a former MP remarked that Johnson, walking down Fleet Street, must have called in. That suggestion has been reprinted as fact ever since. Johnson's circle — Reynolds, Gibbon, Garrick, Boswell — genuinely did drink here, which is the part nobody puts on the sign.
Dickens, Chesterton and Mark Twain are better attested. Ask about the cellars: they are vaulted, older than the pub above them, and said to have belonged to a thirteenth-century Carmelite monastery on the site.
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Mentioned alongside
Part of
The Best Bars and Cafés Where Writers Drank
Eleven rooms with a literary past — Pessoa in bronze outside his Lisbon café, Dylan Thomas's New York bar, Borges in a Buenos Aires basement, and the London pub that invented its Samuel Johnson.
London's Oldest Pubs, Actually Dated
Ten old London pubs with the date on the sign checked against the building behind it — one Grade I coaching inn, one invented 1520, and the city's most repeated pub legend traced to a dinner in 1892.