Ye Olde King's Head, Chigwell — Dickens's Maypole Inn

London · United Kingdom · Inn

Dickens made this inn the Maypole in Barnaby Rudge — the dark heart of the riots. Dick Turpin is said to have drunk in the same rooms.

The timbered house facing the church at Chigwell is among England's oldest inns; parts of the fabric date to the sixteenth century. Charles Dickens loved the place and made it the model for the Maypole Inn in Barnaby Rudge, his novel of the 1780 Gordon Riots, where the mob's madness pours out of that very tavern. It stands on the old road out into Essex and tradition names it as one of Dick Turpin's stopping points during the years he and Tom King worked Epping Forest. The low rooms with their blackened beams and the great open hearth look much as they did in Dickens's day. The building trades as a restaurant now, but what seeps into the rooms is still the eighteenth-century highway: lawlessness, tar, and a mob heading for London.

FAQ

Where is Ye Olde King's Head, Chigwell — Dickens's Maypole Inn located?

Ye Olde King's Head, Chigwell — Dickens's Maypole Inn is in London, United Kingdom.

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Accounts are drawn from local folklore and visitor reports.

Image: Robert Lamb · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons