Ye Olde London, EC4

2 floor Taylor Walker pub serving 3 real ales and food.

Promising looking pub a stone’s throw from St Paul’s cathedral, with leaded windows bearing the familiar ‘Wm Younger Est 1749’ stained glass, now a Taylor Walker house. The street level bar has bar height tables with bar stools, more stools round the sides and around everything else to which it’s possible to affix a ledge, and a slightly raised area at the front with tables and chairs, and is surrounded by traditional 1970s pub red and gold print wallpaper. There were two ale pumps at the bar, sporting Young’s London Gold and Hobgoblin. The barmaid asked me to pay £3.60 for my rather mediocre Hobgoblin, hence I was surprised to receive £1.03 change from a fiver, and on querying this to be told that the price was in fact £3.97. I then noticed that Old Golden Hen and Pride were advertised as also available in the cellar bar. Downstairs you can’t miss the fake book spines stuck to the walls as you enter the cellar bar, which goes back about twice as far as the street level bar. To the right is a beer patio with tables and chairs, and a couple of gargoyles and four large mid-19th century tombstones for some reason. Mains on the pub menu start at £8.25 for a lasagne. Astute readers may sense that I found lots of things I didn’t like about this pub. From a promising start I just felt it got progressively more tacky. I doubt I will visit it again, though I can’t say there’s anything actually wrong with the pub, and daresay some local workers will like it as well as the inevitable tourist trade.

Nice looking pub from the outside with lots of leaded glass windows and hanging baskets, but nothing particularly Olde on the inside. Went through some strange gothic decor period a while back but now reverted to a normal but nothing very spectacular traditional pub decor. Fairly small street level bar and then a bigger area downstairs as reported below. The street level bar can get a bit busy with tourists visiting the nearby St Pauls. Two beers on at the time of my visit, which were Doombar and Youngs Ordinary.

This place is a little deceptive as the public bar is on street level and it isn’t the biggest or most atmospheric, but a quick walk downstairs takes one to a much larger bar that has seating for 120 people. I stayed up in the front public bar where I found the lager to be good and the service to be friendly and although I wouldn’t stay all night I will pop in again when next passing.