Of these old inns, with their yards and galleries, there are but two or three in which the business of entertainment is still carried on. There is the old “Bell Inn,” a grimed, caked, red-brick, ancient building, with its sign of the Bell, a china shop in front, and an archway according to the old pattern. Entering, there is the true old-world flavour—the galleries, the tumble-down stairs fashioned of wood-panelling with projecting eaves, the files of bells outside, the kitchen to the left as in a foreign hotel, strange little rickety stairsteps as from the cabin of a ship, with also the occasional appearance of a figure in one of the galleries. The inn life here, from these arrangements, is certain to correspond—every one is, as it were, in evidence. You can hardly dream of the noisy Holborn just outside. It is very different in the regular hostelries, where everything is at the top of the house or at the bottom, not, as here, all round about it. London has many of these quaint surprises to those who wish to see them. Here is to be seen the low arch, under which the coaches and waggons drove into the inn-yard, with its galleries running round, from which chambermaids looked down or called to those below. Even now it seems a strange order of things and a quaint arrangement, and you wonder how business is carried on at such places.
It is, however, when we cross London Bridge and enter the Borough that we come to the region of inn-yards. Here began the road to Canterbury, and here, in the old times, the waggons and coaches arrived with their goods and passengers; and we are at once struck with the innumerable yards and small inclosures into which these vehicles used to drive. There were a large number of these inns, most of which remain in some shape, surviving at least as public-houses. There were the old “King’s Head,” the old “White Hart,” the new “White Hart,” the “Old George,” the “Queen’s Head,” the “Nag’s Head,” and the “Spur.” Few only of the old pattern remain, and their days, or hours in one case, are certainly numbered. The first is the old “King’s Head,” of which a fragment—some thirty or forty yards long—still stands all ruinous and forlorn, with its two ancient galleries or balustrades in a sadly tottering state, its anatomy exposed in a heartless fashion at each end. One could be sentimental and mournful over it. It is surrounded by new spick and span brickwork, and a new “King’s Head” insolently confronts it and seems to flourish.
THE WHITE HART.
“In the Borough,” says the author of “Pickwick,” “there still remain some half-a-dozen old inns which have preserved their external features unchanged. Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries and passages and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories. It was in the yard of one of these inns—of no less celebrated a one than the ‘White Hart,’ that a man was employed in brushing the dirt off a pair of boots:” the introduction as the world knows, of Mr. Pickwick to the immortal Samuel Weller. The yard is then described: “It presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual characteristics of a large coach inn. Three or four lumbering waggons, each with a pile of goods beneath its ample canopy about the height of a second-floor window of an ordinary house, were stowed away beneath a lofting which extended over one end of the yard; and another, which was to commence its journey in the morning, was drawn out into an open space. A double tier of bedroom galleries with old clumsy balustrades ran round two sides of the straggling area, and a double row of bells to correspond, sheltered from the weather by a little sloping roof, hung over the door leading to the bar and coffee-room. Two or three gigs or chaise-carts were wheeled up under different little sheds and pent-houses.”
The guests, it would appear, slept in rooms giving on the galleries all round; for, we are told, “a loud ringing of one of the bells was followed by the appearance of a smart chambermaid in the upper sleeping gallery, who after tapping at one of the doors and receiving a request from within, called over the balustrade” to Sam. Presently the “bustling landlady of the ‘White Hart’ made her appearance in the opposite gallery, and after a little vituperation, flung a pair of lady’s shoes into the yard and bustled away.”
It is curious to think that this scene was a description of what was going on about fifty years ago, and was kept up for many years after “Pickwick” was written. The picture of that morning—the chambermaid coming out of the room in the gallery, the landlady throwing the boots down to Sam—still rises before us as we turn into the yard. Two sides of the inclosure now remain, but it shows how imposing an establishment must have been the house that in Dickens’s time would be called “the celebrated ‘White Hart Inn.’” The huge tiled roof is there, and the double tiers of galleries, with the doors of the guests’ chambers. But a wooden shed has been built round the lower portion, close to where Sam stood and was questioned by Mr. Perker and Mr. Wardle. Clothes-lines hang across the galleries, and a few years ago squalid women could be seen looking down and surveying the intruders, just as the chambermaid and landlady looked down upon Mr. Weller. A waggon lies up in ordinary in the corner, as it did in Dickens’s day. The whole is black, grimed, rusty, and decayed, and fills the mind with a sort of melancholy, as things “fallen from their high estate” do. By the right rises a flight of stairs leading to the gallery, close to which is a quaint, short balcony. Such is the old “White Hart,” or all that is left of it, which, however, still accommodates a certain number of tenants. On the other side is the newer “White Hart,” with its long row of glass windows, seeming a comfortable place enough.[17]
Our next halt is at the “George,” which has really a bright and