“If you only get the chance to visit one London pub“, I would tell my London visitors forty years ago, “make it the Black Friar“. It is certainly not the oldest pub in London by any stretch of the imagination: even in your wildest dreams you can’t imagine Johnson and Boswell drinking a Campari and Soda there. It is not the best known – it is not on the main tourist trail and you will need to read the small print in the guide books before finding mention of it. Nor has it been held in reverence for centuries: the fact of the matter is that it was almost demolished in the 1960s and only survived after a spirited fight by a coalition of supporters that included pub-lovers, architectural historians and lovers of eccentricity of all sorts.
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