The Lord Raglan - London's Roman Wall Pub

The Lord Raglan pub recently proudly announced the launch of their new food menu.

To congratulate the pub on this great news, we decided to gift them with a special, short, bonus episode featuring the history of their pub - The Lord Raglan, Holborn.

Enjoy and share the joy! Send this episode onto your network. It's a great way to support British tourism, and the host of small businesses that are our historic pubs.

Transcript

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This is a bonus episode, a one-off, a gift. The Lord Ragland Pub on St. Martin's Le Grand in the City of London just relaunched their food menu. And that deserves marking. Not just because great pub food is one of life's genuine pleasures, but because of where this pub sits, what it's built on, what it's survived to get here. When a pub with this history puts a new menu on the bar, that's worth talking about. So take a load off, sit back and enjoy the story of the Lord Raglan pub. The pub sits at 61 St. Martin's Le Grand, EC1A4ER. It's in a central location just north of St. Paul's Cathedral in the heart of the city of London. And when I say the heart of the city, I mean the actual ancient heart. Romans built here. There's a Roman wall in the cellar of the pub. It's not a replica, it's not a heritage display behind glass. A section of genuine Roman defensive wall sitting under your feet while you eat your fish and chips. A pub has been on this site since at least the sixteenth century. The original name was the fountain, then it became the bush. Then, after the Great Fire of London tore through the city in 1666, it was rebuilt and renamed the Morning Bush. One interpretation could be a pub named for grief amidst the smouldering ruin of a city, named probably because the landlord looked out of his door at a wasteland of ash and charred timber, and still opened up for business anyway. In pubs just as theatre, the show must go on. It's more likely, however, that the tavern keeper on hearing the news of Charles I's beheading, painted the bush on the pub sign black. Hence the name the Morning Bush likely originating seventeen years before the Great Fire. The building stand in today dates from 1855, which is when it got its current name, the Lord Raglan. In 1854, Britain was at war with Russia. It was the Crimean War. One of the first modern war correspondents, William Howard Russell, is sending dispatches back to the Times from the front, and the public is gripped, reading about the campaign in real time. The man in command of British forces is Lord Ragland, Field Marshal Fitzroy Somerset, 1st Baron Ragland. With Lord Ragland's title, there's also a Welsh connection for the Lord Ragland pub. Lord Ragland took his title from Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire, South East Wales, a fifteenth century fortification that had been a ruin since 1646 when parliamentary forces destroyed it during the English Civil War. The Somerset family's deep roots in that part of Wales made the choice of title a natural one. Lord Raglan was a creature of the establishment, a Wellington man. He'd served as military secretary to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo in 1815. Raglan lost his right arm after it was shattered by a musket ball fired by a French sniper from the roof of La Haye Saint during the Battle of Waterloo on june eighteenth, eighteen fifteen. The arm was amputated without anesthetic, and he famously asked for it back to retrieve his wife's wedding ring. Forty years later, at the age of sixty-five, he's put in command of a major campaign, the first time he's leading troops in the field since losing that arm. It doesn't go well. Nolan was killed immediately, taking the truth of what he meant with him. Tennyson writes a poem about it. The following year Raglan dies in the Crimea, worn down by the campaign and the controversy. The pub on St. Martin's Le Grand, rebuilt that same year, 1855, takes his name. Victorian London was in the habit of naming things after military men, the patriotic reflex, if you will. File this next one under things I did not know. There's one other thing Raglan gave his name to. The Raglan sleeve, the style of coat sleeve that extends in one piece all the way up to the collar with no seam at the shoulder. He favoured it after the amputation of his arm, a practical adaptation, a design born from necessity. Let's get back to food. A new menu at the Lord Ragland pub, fish and chips, sausage and mash, steak and ale pie, gammon, burgers, the classics. Here's what I find interesting about that menu. Pub food in Britain has had a complicated century. In the post-war decades it largely disappeared. The pub was for drinking. Food was an afterthought, a bag of crisps on the bar, a pickled egg, or a sad lonely saveloy. And that's if you were lucky. Then came the gastro pub revolution of the nineties, and the pendulum swung the other way. Suddenly pubs were restaurants that just happened to serve beer. White tablecloths, amused bouche, mains pushing towards twenty-five pounds per person. Well, the pendulum swung back again. Give people what they want. Proper food, cooked well, served in a pub without pretension or performance. Just the honest transaction the pubs have been delivering on this site for centuries. The menu changed, the mission did not. That's the Raglan principle, applied to hospitality. You adapt the sleeve, you keep the coat. When you find yourself at St. Paul's Cathedral, walk north, find 61 St. Martin's Le Grand, go downstairs if they let you and look at the Roman wall. Then go back upstairs, order something from the new menu, have a pint. Say publicity, your London Travel Toolkit podcast sent you. They won't get you a free meal or a free pint, but you can savour your experience, flush in the knowledge that your support in British tourism and the vital network of small businesses that are the nation's historic pubs. Raise a glass to the Lord Raglan, one of London's oldest pub sites, one of the city's most enduring institutions. A reminder that the best things in this city don't just survive, they adapt.