I’ve just bought Tolkien’s pub in Oxford. Well, to be more precise, I and more than 300 fellow drinkers have bought the Lamb and Flag, the 400-year-old Oxford pub where the Inklings group of writers – including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – drank.
Like so many pubs across the country, the Lamb and Flag closed, in January last year, thanks to the pandemic trading slump. Across the road, the Eagle and Child pub also closed, in 2020, because of Covid. Tolkien and Lewis drank there, too – they called it ‘the Bird and Baby’. It remains shut.
What rare survival stories these two pubs are – or were. The Eagle and Child, owned by St John’s College, opened in 1650. The Lamb and Flag, also owned by St John’s, opened in 1613 – there’s said to be a lost smuggling tunnel leading from the cellar, dug during the Civil War when Royalist Oxford was besieged by the Parliamentarians.
It had the comforting, unchanging feel of a pub that had lasted for ever and would continue for eternity
The Lamb and Flag was altruistic, too. When the going was good in the 2000s, St John’s wisely used the pub’s £50,000 profit to provide £12,000 scholarships for PhD students – a list of St John’s College Lamb and Flag Scholars hangs on one of its walls.
How tragic it would be if these two ancient, bewitching pubs disappeared, along with four centuries’ worth of memories of old drinkers, including some of the most famous writers in the English language. How worrying, too, for the British pub if they couldn’t survive, given their location at the heart of the world’s most famous university, with millions of tourists on their doorstep. I used to drink in both pubs when I was at the university 30 years ago.
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