Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese hides up Wine Office Court at 145 Fleet Street, a short walk from Blackfriars station. A pub has traded on this spot since 1538, and the current building went up in 1667 after the Great Fire took the original.
Samuel Smith Old Brewery has owned it since the early 1990s, so the taps pour the Yorkshire brewer's ales at some of the lowest prices in the City. The pub holds a Grade II listing and a place on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors.
Drinkers who want low ceilings, sawdust history, and a pint under 6 pounds will settle in for hours. Anyone who needs cocktails, music, or a phone signal should look elsewhere, because Samuel Smith house rules keep the rooms screen free and quiet.
The pub sprawls across multiple floors of wood panelled rooms, vaulted cellars, and narrow stairs, and first timers reliably get lost. Londonist describes it as a labyrinth where each room keeps its own atmosphere, and the front bar with the open fire stays the most contested seat in the house.
Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Bitter anchors the bar at about 5.60 pounds a pint, with the brewery's porters, stouts, and fruit beers behind it. The chop house menu runs to steak and ale pudding at about 16 pounds. Skip the upstairs dining room on a first visit and drink where Dickens did, in the ground floor bar.
Planning a longer night? Start with our guide to the best after work bars in London and build the crawl from there.
City workers fill it on weekday evenings from 5pm to 8pm, and weekends bring tourists tracing Dr Johnson, who lived around the corner at 17 Gough Square. Wikipedia records that Charles Dickens used the pub and alluded to it in A Tale of Two Cities.
