Lamb and Flag Review: The Pub Where Satire Got a Kicking

Covent Garden’s oldest pub was nicknamed the Bucket of Blood, and once hosted the beating of a satirist. We took notes.

We should declare an interest. In December 1679, the poet and satirist John Dryden walked out of a pub in Covent Garden into the narrow alley beside it and was set upon by masked men who beat him to the ground. The attack was widely understood to be payment for something he had written. The alley is Rose Street. The pub is the Lamb and Flag. This publication takes a professional interest in the incident.

The Bucket of Blood

The pub’s other name – the one that stuck for most of the nineteenth century – was the Bucket of Blood, awarded on merit. The upstairs room and the cobbled yard behind it were used for bare-knuckle prize fights, which drew gamblers, drew crowds onto the window ledges, and drew, on a good night, quite a lot of blood, which is where the marketing came from.

Today that upstairs room is called the Dryden Room. It has caricatures and cuttings on the walls. It is quite nice. You can get a whisky. There is no longer any bare-knuckle boxing, though the Prat’s research desk has established that on a Friday at 18:40 the ground floor achieves a comparable density of standing men in a comparable state of agitation, with the crucial difference that in 1830 you could at least see who was elbowing you.

Age, and the lies told about it

The pub is Grade II listed and is enthusiastically described around Covent Garden as dating from 1623, from Tudor times, from the reign of James I. The official listing suggests the building is early 18th century, perhaps 1688, and that the site first became licensed premises in 1772, under the name the Coopers Arms.

So: a pub that is genuinely, verifiably, one of the oldest in central London, and which cannot resist rounding up by 150 years anyway. There is something magnificently English about a 300-year-old building lying about its age in the direction of older.

Dickens, obviously

Charles Dickens drank here, as he did – according to the plaques of London – in approximately 900 other establishments, in an era before he had written anything, while working around the corner sticking labels onto pots of boot-black for six shillings a week. The Institute for Literary Footfall in Bermondsey has calculated that if every pub claiming Dickens as a regular is telling the truth, the man spent 31 hours a day drinking and produced fifteen novels by accident.

What it is actually like now

Small, dark, wood-panelled, Fuller’s-run, and rammed. The crowd spills out into Rose Street and Lazenby Court and stands there in the cold with pints, in the precise spot where England’s first Poet Laureate was assaulted for making a joke about the King’s mistress. Nobody mentions this. The plaque is right there. Five thousand people have reviewed the pub and it holds 4.5 stars, and not one of them appears to have connected the dots.

Verdict

Excellent pub. Genuine history. Beer is fine, whisky list is better than it needs to be, and the upstairs is worth the stairs. Go, drink, and read the plaque. Then consider that satire in this country has always been a contact sport, and that the difference between 1679 and now is mainly that the beating happens online.

Official site: lambandflagcoventgarden.co.uk.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]