This distinctive little pub, built at the end of the Victorian era in 1898 opposite the impressive and imposing Royal Courts of Justice, is clearly mock Elizabethan—it’s not wonky enough to be the real thing. It has little real history to speak of, but it’s a prominent and outstanding building, a very good pub, in a tremendous location and is the only pub on the eastern end of the Strand, which are good enough reasons to include it as our starting point. Doctor Johnson was supposedly a patron here, but everywhere makes that claim, and that was in a previous incarnation—there has been an inn or coffee shop here since 1723. Another client was Horace Walpole, the first prime minister of Great Britain.