George Orwell used to drink at the Dog and Duck on Bateman Street. When Animal Farm was picked up by the American Book of the Month Club in 1945, the landlord produced a bottle of 135 proof absinthe and Orwell celebrated there. He also drank at the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, and at the Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place, where he is said to have thrown up over the bar. Dylan Thomas was doing the same circuit — the Fitzroy, the Wheatsheaf, the French House on Dean Street — sometimes on the same evenings, sometimes in the same condition. Thomas arrived in Fitzrovia in 1933 and stayed, on and off, until pub closing times and borrowed money ran out. He left the only manuscript of Under Milk Wood under his chair at the French House. The staff found it and gave it back.

The Fitzrovia-to-Soho triangle that anchors this crawl existed because of economics, not inspiration. In the 1930s and 1940s, Charlotte Street and Rathbone Place had cheap rooms above shops, and the pubs were the only heated spaces a writer without a regular income could sit in for the price of a half. The Fitzroy Tavern was run by Judah Kleinfeld, a Polish-Jewish ex-tailor from Savile Row who everyone called Pop. Under his management it became the centre of a bohemian scene that gave the whole neighbourhood its name — the journalist Tom Driberg coined “Fitzrovia” in the 1940s, after the pub. Augustus John, Nina Hamnett, Quentin Crisp, Aleister Crowley, and half of the BBC were regulars. Orwell used the Newman Arms round the corner as the model for the proles’ pub in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was writing about what he knew.

The crawl runs south from Fitzrovia into Soho, then east to Fleet Street and across the river to Borough. The geography traces a shift in centuries — from the twentieth-century bohemians of Charlotte Street to the Victorian and Georgian literati of Fleet Street and Southwark. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, rebuilt after the Great Fire in 1667, had Samuel Johnson as a regular and W.B. Yeats co-founding the Rhymers’ Club in its back room in 1890. The George Inn on Borough High Street is London’s last surviving galleried coaching inn, owned by the National Trust, and Dickens referenced it in Little Dorrit while his father was locked up in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison around the corner. Dickens was a prolific pub-goer even by the standards of his era. He drank at the Lamb on Lamb’s Conduit Street when he lived on Doughty Street. He drank at the Cheshire Cheese. He drank, by most accounts, everywhere.

You should start at the Fitzroy Tavern around one o’clock on a Thursday or Friday, when Fitzrovia is busy enough to have atmosphere but not so packed that you can’t get a seat. The Soho pubs are a two-minute walk from each other, which is convenient and dangerous in roughly equal measure. After the Coach and Horses you’ll need to get across to Fleet Street — walk or take the Central line one stop from Tottenham Court Road to Chancery Lane. Then it’s the Northern line south to London Bridge for the George Inn. We’d recommend a pint at each, not a half, except at the French House, where a half is all you’ll get. That’s been the rule since the 1920s, when Victor Berlemont banned pint glasses because French sailors kept smashing them over each other’s heads.

None of these writers drank in pubs because pubs made them better writers. Pubs were warm, pubs were cheap, pubs were open, and pubs didn’t ask what you were working on. The manuscript got left under the chair. The celebration involved absinthe at ten in the morning. The columnist wrote his column from the barstool because going home meant stopping. This crawl is eight pubs across five centuries of people who wrote important things and drank more than was good for them.