A Reminder of the Coaching Days It takes a miracle to attract some people. Men who have passed down the Borough High-street every day for 20 years have admitted to me that they have never seen the George Inn. Yet there it stands, just a few yards from the highway, a precious relic of the old coaching days.
Southwark was full of inns and innkeepers in the Middle Ages. Pilgrims to Canterbury and travellers to the South Coast passed over London Bridge and put in at the White Hart, the Tabard, or the George. All the historic inns disappeared in the great Southwark fire of 1676. Some claim that the citizens of the South were jealous of the notoriety gained by the men of London proper, who had their fire ten years earlier. One generous hearted cleric, writing in 1676, laid; that blame on a "gang of Irish
pains."? ruffians who had £1,000 for their Be that as it may, the inns disappeared, but the George was rebuilt on the old model in the year that the fire occurred. It was built round a quadrangle, and_ the coaches drove in under one archway and out at another.
Only one wing} remains to-day, but it gives us an exact idea of the inns of the old days.
The coffee-room is on the! level of the courtyard, and the taproom, with its relies of other ys, stands next door. Above here is an out-door staircase which leads to the galleries, from which the bedrooms can be reached.
Was the George in Dickens, mind when he wrote of Mr. Pickwick? No one knows. He knew the house, of course; but he wrote of the White Hart. The partisan of the george declares that the description given suggests the George rather than the inn which stood a few yards off. People who know their London make their way from time to time to this old-time -hostelry and take their lunch or tea in the old-world compartments of the coffee-room, and then examine the galleries and covet the mahon gony four-posters in the bedrooms.
Before the war certain clubs used to dine here once a year. Some have kept up the practice, but others have disappeared. I used to get an invitation to the annual feast of the Sacred Order of the Rolling
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.