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"Hello, and welcome to YourHistoryHere, the place where you can share your knowledge about those unusual places, buildings or things that make places interesting to live. This site is on limited circulation at the moment, and is only supposed to be a mySociety demo, not a big posh project like PledgeBank. It may not be obvious, but the most important feature of YourHistoryHere is the construction of an underlying system for collecting and sharing geographic annotations in an open syndicated format, so you can use the yummy local data people leave for your own purposes. We're building two sites that show how this can be useful, this one and Placeopedia.com, and we'd love to share the code for other ideas. Anyone want to build WhereIHadMyFirstKiss.com? Tom Steinberg, mySociety Director - 23/08/2005"

About This Place...

The pub garden at the Angel

The Angel is a nice, mint condition Victorian pub stuck away in a backstreet in a part of town where quality pubs are hard to find.It has a little beer garden out back, which would be ideal if it wasn't for one thing. It closes at 5.15PM every day, just about the time that most people are thinking they might like a drink. Does anyone know why this rule exists here, and not in any other pub garden I've ever sat in?

Long. -0.12825, Lat. 51.51547 | written on 11th Sep 2005 by Tom Steinberg | Email this to a friend | abusive?

Responses

will_p replies: this is very close to the spot at which Hogarth's infamous Gin Lane ethching was sketched.

http://www.abcgallery.com/H/hogarth/hogarth48.html

If you look carefully you wil recognise the church tower in the background (on new oxford street)

St Giles was an infamous parish at that time, for poverty and debauchery, just outside the City. Ackroyd captures it well in london a history

there are a surprising number of residents in that area who have to fight for any sort of quiet

written 9th Oct 2005 | abusive?

Sharon replies: This pub is on the site of a large mediaeval leper hospital!
After that, an earlier inn by the same name became a major coaching inn, and was one of several pubs along this stretch of road to offer a last drink to convicted convicts passing by on the cart taking them up the road to hanging at Tyburn. In the 1400s they wouldn't have had to go so far because there was a gallows across the road, under Centrepoint. The churchyard next door contains some of those hung as well as two plague pits. The church was also centre of the parish where the 1665 great plagues is generally agreed to have started. Nice spot!

written 17th Jan 2008 | abusive?

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