Stop 3 of 8
The main hall of The Cittie of Yorke is one of those rooms where you stop talking when you walk in. A 50-foot ceiling, thousand-gallon wine vats mounted above the bar, and individual wooden booths that were originally designed so that lawyers from the nearby Inns of Court could discuss cases without being overheard. A pub has occupied this High Holborn site since around 1430, but the current interior is largely the work of a wine merchant named George Henekey who rebuilt it in 1831, with another reconstruction in 1924. During the Blitz, the landlord drained the port from those overhead vats into the gutter rather than risk them crashing down from a bomb blast. Samuel Smith's bought the place in 1975 and renamed it — the original Cittie of Yorke was actually across the road.