Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

Age

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese is one of a number of pubs in London to have been rebuilt shortly after the Great Fire of 1666. There has been a pub at this location since 1538. While there are several older pubs which have survived because they were beyond the reach of the fire, or like The Tipperary on the opposite side of Fleet Street because they were made of stone, this pub continues to attract interest due to the curious lack of natural lighting inside which generates its own gloomy charm.

Some of the interior wood panelling is nineteenth century, some older, perhaps original. The vaulted cellars are thought to belong to a 13th-century Carmelite monastery which once occupied the site. The entrance to this pub is situated in a narrow alleyway and is very unassuming, yet once inside visitors will realise that the pub occupies a lot of floor space and has numerous bars and gloomy rooms. In winter, open fireplaces are used to keep the interior warm. In the bar room are posted plaques showing famous people who were regulars.

The pub is currently owned and operated by the Samuel Smith Brewery.

Literary associations

The literary figures Oliver Goldsmith, Mark Twain, Alfred Tennyson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, P. G. Wodehouse and Dr. Johnson are all said to have been 'regulars'. However, there is no recorded evidence that Dr Johnson ever visited the pub, only that he lived close by, at 17 Gough Square. At The Johnson Club supper, 13 December 1892, 'an eloquent gentleman, present, an Irish Ex MP, pointed out that when Dr Johnson acted on his famous suggestion "let us take a walk down Fleet Street" the Cheshire Cheese must of necessity have been included among his places of call.'

Charles Dickens had been known to use the establishment frequently, and due to the pub's gloomy charm it is easy to imagine that Dickens modelled some of his darker characters there. The pub is famously alluded to in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: following Charles Darnay’s acquittal on charges of high treason, Sydney Carton invites him to dine, "drawing his arm through his own" Carton leads him to Fleet Street "up a covered way, into a tavern … where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine". R.L.Stevenson mentions the Cheese in The Dynamiter (1885), 'a select society at the Cheshire Cheese engaged my evenings.' A Tale of Two Cities was in part the inspiration for the American children's book The Cheshire Cheese Cat by Carmen Agra Deedy, Randall Wright and Barry Moser, which is set in the pub. After a visit with friends Kates, Erin and Lauren to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on one misty London Night in 2002 authors Carmen Agra Deedy and Randal Wright were inspired to write a novel for young children titled "The Cheshire Cheese Cat : a Dickens of a tale". The novel takes place at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub and centers around a cheese loving cat named Skilley, who despises the thought of eating a mouse, and a mouse named Pip. The two become friends as the tale unfolds. The book opens with the line "He was the best of Toms, He was the worst of Toms" a parody the book by Charles Dickens who makes his appearance in the book. The book is illustrated by Barry Moser.

The Cheshire Cheese pub appears in Anthony Trollope's novel "Ralph the Heir", where one of the characters, Ontario Moggs, is described as speaking "with vigor at the debating club at the Cheshire Cheese in support of unions and the rights of man . . ."

Wodehouse, though so many of his characters were members of posh London clubs, often preferred the homey intimacy of the pub. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "Yesterday, I looked in at the Garrick at lunchtime, took one glance of loathing at the mob, and went off to lunch by myself at the Cheshire Cheese." The pub is mentioned by name in some of his books as well.

The Rhymers' Club was a group of London-based poets, founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. Originally not much more than a dining club, it produced anthologies of poetry in 1892 and 1894. They met at the Cheshire Cheese and in the 'Domino Room' of the Café Royal.[2]

According to the Betty Crocker cookbook, both Dickens and Ben Jonson dined on Welsh rarebit at this pub, despite the fact that the latter died almost a century before the dish is first known to have been recorded.

The Soviet writer Boris Pilnyak visited this pub during his stay in London in 1923. He later wrote a story entitled "Staryi syr," ("old cheese" in Russian) a part of which takes place in the Cheshire Cheese Pub. There is a chapter devoted to the Cheshire Cheese and the 'Companions of the Cheshire Cheese' (W.B Yeats' poem 'The Grey Rock' 1914) in 'That Irishman: The Life and Times of John O'Connor Power' by Jane Stanford.

The founding meeting of the Medical Journalists' Association took place at the 'Cheese' on February 1, 1967. At that a time health journalism was in its infancy and medical doctors who wrote articles under their own name could be reported to the General Medical Council. From an initial membership of 48, the MJA now represents around 500 journalists, broadcasters and editors.

A 1680 broadside ballad called A New Ballad of the Midwives Ghost tells a fantastical story of how a midwife haunted the house where she died until she was able to induce the new residents there to dig up the bones of some bastard children she had made away with and buried there. The final lines of the ballad insist upon the veracity of the tale and even that the children's bones may be seen for proof displayed at the Cheshire Cheese.

Polly the Parrot

For around 40 years, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese was associated with an African grey parrot named Polly. The fame of the parrot was such that on its death in 1926 around 200 newspapers across the world wrote an obituary, while the news was read out on 2LO.

Erotic tiles

In 1962, the pub gave the Museum of London a number of sexually explicit erotic plaster of paris tiles recovered from an upper room. These tiles strongly suggest that the room was used as a brothel in the mid-eighteenth century.