Pubs with Rooms in The City and Smithfield

The City of London is the Square Mile that the capital grew out of, and it still has the churches, alleys and Victorian market halls to show for it, squeezed in between the towers. A pub with rooms here is a different proposition from one in the Cotswolds: the building may well be a former bank, and everything from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Tower of London is on foot. Leadenhall Market’s painted Victorian roof, in the picture above, is close to the Counting House on Cornhill.

The Counting House is the grandest. It is a Fuller’s pub in the domed banking hall of the former Prescott’s Bank, a Grade II listed building of 1891-92, with fifteen bedrooms upstairs in what was once the City University Club and breakfast included in the rate. A short walk north on Devonshire Row, by Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street, the Bull & Hide is a smaller corner pub with ten rooms and a pub record going back to at least 1805.

Smithfield, on the City’s northern edge, is a different kind of place. The Fox & Anchor, a Grade II listed pub of 1898 with Art Nouveau-influenced tilework, sits beside the old meat market and has six rooms upstairs. The Barbican, the Museum of London and St Paul’s are a short walk away, and Farringdon station is close by.

Smithfield is where London’s history gets grim. Sir William Wallace was executed at West Smithfield in 1305, Wat Tyler was killed there in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and Protestants were burnt at the stake under Mary I, all well recorded. Bartholomew Fair ran here from the 12th century until it was shut down in 1855, and a plague burial ground was opened beside Charterhouse in 1348, though the ghost stories that cluster around both are the stuff of walking tours and not of record. Go east into the Square Mile and the oldest layer is Roman: the Roman basilica and forum lay under Cornhill, which is why you will hear that wherever a City basement is dug, something ancient turns up, a claim that needs checking building by building.