Inns and Taverns of Old London

For all races of Teutonic origin the claim is made that they are essentially home-loving people. Yet the Englishman of the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries especially of the latter is seen to have exercised considerable zeal in creating substitutes for that home which as a Teuton he ought to have loved above all else. This at any rate was emphatically the case with the Londoner as the following pages will testify. When he had perfected his taverns and inns perfected them that is according to the light of the olden time he set to work evolving a new species of public resort in the coffee-house.That type of establishment appears to have been responsible for the development of the club another substitute for the home. And then came the age of the pleasure-garden. Both the latter survive the one in a form of a more rigid exclusiveness than the eighteenth century Londoner would have deemed possible; the other in so changed a guise that frequenters of the prototype would scarcely recognize the relationship. But the coffee-house and the inn and tavern of old London exist but as a picturesque memory which these pages attempt to revive. -Preface H.C.S.