London’s oldest pub
Lazenby Court in Covent Garden used to lead a small courtyard surrounded by houses, but the rebuilding of the area in the 1860s to extend Hart Street now renamed Floral Street. The narrow passage and the famous Lamb and Flag Pub.
In Tudor times, when all around here were still fields, the building is actually early 18th century refaced with new bricks in the 1950s has only been a pub since the 1770s. Originally known as The Coopers Arms, then it became the Lamb & Flag in 1833.
The pub acquired a good reputation in the early nineteenth century for staging bare-knuckle prize fights, earning the nickname “ The Bucket of Blood” and the alleyway beside the pub was the scene of an attack on the poet, John Dryden, in 16798 by thugs reputedly sent by the Earl of Rochester who he had reportedly attacked in his poems as a notorious womaniser.
Although Dryden survived the attack offering £50 for the identity of the thugs placed in the London Gazette and a Royal Pardon in one of them would confess, no one claimed the reward.
It is said that Charles Dickens frequented the pub, but as half the pubs in London make the same claim, either the author was perpetually drunk or the claim is dubious in most cases.
The northern side of the alley has a 19-century warehouse that used to have an ugly 1980s electricity substation but now is an open courtyard.
Down in the alley on the pub side is the Weatherboarded facing that is probably late 18th to early 19th century.