Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of the disease. Some scholars have suggested that a popular nursery rhyme refers to
the dreaded disease (while others brush this off as bunk):
Ring around the rosie
(flower garlands to keep the Plague away)
A pocket full of posies
(buboes on the groin)
Ashes, ashes
(your skin turns black)
We all fall down
(dead).
•
At the other end of Gough Square, turn right at the statue of Hodge and head back toward
Fleet Street, noticing the lists of barristers (trial lawyers) on the doorways (e.g., next to
the door at 9 Gough Square). They work not as part of a firm, but as freelancers sharing
offices and clerks. Stay to the left as you wind downhill through the alleys, and look near
Fleet Street for the entrance of...
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Tavern
Johnson often—and I do mean often—popped 'round here for a quick one, sometimes with
David Garrick and his sleazy actor friends.
“The Cheese” dates from 1667, when it was rebuilt after the Great Fire, but it's been a
tavern since 1538. It's a four-story warren of small, smoky, wood-lined rooms, each offer-
ing different menus, from pub grub to white-tablecloth meals. A traditional “chop house,”
it serves hearty portions of meats to power-lunching businessmen.
Sit in Charles Dickens' favorite seat, next to a coal fireplace (in the “Chop Room,”
main floor) and order a steak-and-kidney pie and some spotted dick (sponge pudding with
currants). Sip a pint of Samuel Smith (the house beer of the current owners) and think of
Samuel Johnson, who drank here pondering various spellings: “pint” or “pynte,” “color”
or “colour,” “theater” or “theatre.” Immerse yourself in a world largely unchanged for cen-
turies, a world of reporters scribbling the news over lunch, of Alfred Lord Tennyson in-
venting rhymes and Arthur Conan Doyle solving crimes, of W. B. Yeats, Teddy Roosevelt,
and Mark Twain.
