That pub on the riverfront is the Anchor, and there has been a tavern standing on this exact spot for more than eight hundred years — which makes it, by most reckonings, the oldest surviving drinking spot on this whole stretch of the Thames. Low doorways, uneven floors, and a warren of small connected rooms all still give away its age before anyone tells you a date. It's changed hands and been rebuilt more than once since Shakespeare's day, but a pub has never once stopped operating on this footprint. The building itself dates from the seventeen seventies, but it started life two centuries before that as the tap room for the Anchor Brewery next door. It's the last riverside inn left from the era when this district was solidly theatreland — when the Globe, the Swan, and the Rose all stood within walking distance, and actors drank here after the shows let out.
That brewery next door became one of the largest in the world, and when its owner died in seventeen eighty-one, the dictionary w
riter Samuel Johnson — a friend of the family — stepped in as an executor to help sell it. Nervous bankers doubted the business was worth what Johnson was asking. His reply survives word for word: "We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." It sold for one hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds — a fortune at the time,
