Literature is full of imaginary pubs that provide the backdrop for some of the best fictional scenes, and I'd like to guide you around a few. Watch your step, though, because in the world of fiction a quiet pint doesn't always make for a good read …
Our first stop is the Sailor's Arms, in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. There's a ship's clock in the bar that's stayed still at 11.30am for 50 years – it's always opening time, so we can carry as long as we like while Sinbad Sailors draws us a pint in the shafts of sunlight.
Onward to the seaside outskirts of Bristol, and the fine taverns described in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Jim Hawkins' parents run The Admiral Benbow Inn, but for real salty sea dog atmospherics let's try the nearby Spyglass Inn: "It was a bright enough little place of entertainment. The sign was newly painted; the windows had neat red curtains; the floor was cleanly sanded." But keep an eye on the landlord, a chap that goes by the name of Long John Silver …
Perhaps a change of pace. A country pub next, on the road between London and Cambridge. The titular Green Man from Kingsley Amis's 1969 novel, where all is not what it seems, and mine host Maurice Allington seems to have a lot on his mind … not least the cold presence of a long-dead 17th-century occultist.
Something a little more upmarket now? Pomeroy's Wine Bar in London, where we might persuade John Mortimer's acerbic creation, Horace Rumpole, to share with us his latest bottle of Château Fleet Street.
There's just time to pop down to Charing Cross Road and The Leaky Cauldron, a remarkably well-appointed pub with rooms, considering it's out of a children's book. JK Rowling's Harry Potter was known to take room number 11 here, and it's raison d'etre as a gateway between the magical and muggle worlds might allow us a brief visit to some pubs that have populated fantasy fiction.
Say what you like about JRR Tolkien, he did write a good pub. You can hardly throw a Hobbit without hitting an inn or tavern. Me, I'd go for the Green Dragon at Bywater, if only for Merry and Pippin's cinematic ditty: "You can drink your fancy ales/ You can drink 'em by the flagon/ But the only brew for the brave and true/ Comes from The Green Dragon!"
Back in the real world, perhaps the most quintessentially English of writers, PG Wodehouse, dreamed up the most evocative country villages committed to paper, within each of them a rural pub where you'd love to spend a lazy summer day.
Perhaps we should end our tour in his Angler's Rest, where Miss Postlethwaite will provide us with libations while we enjoy, in Wodehouse's own words, the twilight that "had fallen on the little garden of the Angler's Rest, and the air was fragrant with the sweet smell of jasmine and tobacco plant. Stars were peeping out. Blackbirds sang drowsily in the shrubbery ... It was, in short, as a customer who had looked in for a gin and tonic rather happily put it, a nice evening."
From a pub where it is always opening time to an inn where twilight lasts forever … thanks for your agreeable company.
