Fire has marked this Fleet Street pub through its many years. Flames tore through the building in 1666 during the Great Fire of London, scorching over 100 years of pub history. A year later the pub reopened, and from a visit now it's clear that not a great deal has changed since. Then it happened again in 1962: a fire – luckily not quite so 'great' – broke out on the upper storey.
This made its impact felt in other ways, its devastation unveiling a few clues to the pub's then-unknown history. In the wreckage of the fire, pornographic tiles were uncovered and historians have since commented that these sordid scenes may have been a 'mood-enhancer' in an 18th-century gentlemen’s club or maybe even a brothel upstairs.
Sadly, the tiles have been squirreled away by the Museum of London rather than put on display in the pub. What is on show is a chair dedicated to Dickens (let’s face it, which historic London pubs didn’t he drink in?), and a parrot in a cage – although not Polly the Parrot, the pub’s rude squawker famous enough to have had an obituary in the international press in 1926.
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