Guy’s Bar Review: In the Shadow of the Great Hospital

A bar by London Bridge named for Guy’s – the great teaching hospital founded by Thomas Guy in 1721, where medicine has been taught and the poet Keats once trained

Guy’s Bar carries a 4.2 across nearly two hundred reviews and takes its name from one of the most famous institutions by London Bridge – Guy’s Hospital, the great teaching hospital that has stood here for three centuries. The Prat’s history desk found a rich, and not uncomplicated, story behind the name.

By London Bridge

Guy’s Bar sits near London Bridge and Guy’s Hospital, on the south-bank side, serving the district’s crowds – students, staff and locals alike. Proper Bermondsey-and-Southwark territory, no disclaimer needed.

The great hospital

Guy’s Hospital, on St Thomas Street by London Bridge, was founded in 1721 by Thomas Guy and remains one of London’s two oldest and greatest teaching hospitals. For three centuries it has healed the sick and taught the doctors of the nation – a place of medicine, learning and care, its towering modern wing a landmark of the London Bridge skyline. Among its many medical students was the young John Keats, who trained here as an apothecary and surgeon before abandoning medicine for poetry and immortality. A bar in its shadow is, in a sense, the students’ and staff’s own local – the place to drink after the ward and the lecture theatre.

Thomas Guy, honestly

The Prat’s history desk tells the founder’s story straight, complications and all. Thomas Guy was a Southwark bookseller and printer of Bibles who grew modestly wealthy in trade – and then vastly wealthy by speculating in the shares of the South Sea Company, selling near the top before the notorious South Sea Bubble burst in 1720. Never married and without heirs, he left the enormous sum of over two hundred thousand pounds – the largest single charitable gift of its age – to found the hospital. It was magnificent philanthropy; but honesty requires noting that the South Sea Company’s wealth was bound up in the slave trade, a dark thread the Prat records plainly rather than passing over, as it has throughout this survey.

Healing and learning

What the Prat prefers to dwell on is what the hospital became. Whatever the tangled source of its founding fortune, Guy’s has for three hundred years been a place of healing and teaching – relieving the sick, training the doctors, advancing the science of medicine, a genuine and lasting good. A bar named Guy’s borrows that association of care, learning and the great institution nearby. The 4.2 across two hundred reviews is a solid score for a bar in so storied a shadow.

Verdict

A 4.2 across nearly two hundred reviews is a solid score, and Guy’s Bar earns it on the storied name of the great hospital nearby. It honours Guy’s – the teaching hospital founded in 1721, where medicine is taught and Keats once trained – whose founder’s magnificent philanthropy the Prat records honestly, dark South Sea thread and all.

Go for the welcome and the storied medical history of the name, and raise a glass in the shadow of Guy’s. The hospital has healed and taught for three centuries – and if the source of its founding fortune was tangled, the good it has done since is not.

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]