Portal:London/Did you know/05 2009

Did you know...

... that the Grade I George Inn is owned by the National Trust and appears on a map dating to 1543. It is London's only remaining coaching Inn, many of which were in the district of Southwark, to the south of London Bridge.
... that the Old Truman Brewery stands on Brick Lane and has seen generations of Huguenot, Jewish and, most recently, Bangladeshi immigrants pass its door since 1666.
... that the Fortune of War stood in Smithfield, at the place where the Great Fire of London is said to have stopped in 1666. It was also appointed by the Royal Humane Society as a place "for the reception of drowned persons"; and so became a poplar resort of resurrectionists supplying corpses to the surgeons of St Bartholomew's Hospital.
... that the Spaniards Inn dates from 1585 and stands on Hampstead Heath, opposite the original toll house, forming a chicane in the busy road. The public house appears in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers and Barnaby Rudge; in Bram Stoker's Dracula. The garden is also where John Keats wrote his poem "Ode to a Nightingale".
... that in 1814, 9 people died in the London Beer Flood after a large vat of the drink burst at the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road.