The Dinners of Old London

Dinner at the Mercers’ Hall, c.1910

Is that your stomach rumbling or is it the sound of distant thunder I hear? To take your mind off hunger, let us pass the time until we eat by studying these old glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Insititute. Observe the architecture of gastronomy as expressed in the number and variety of ancient halls – the dining halls, the banquet halls and the luncheon rooms – where grand people once met for lengthy meals. Let us consider the dinners of old London.

The choicest meat from Smithfield, the finest fish from Billingsgate, and the freshest vegetables from Covent Garden and Spitalfields, they all found their way onto these long tables – such as the one in Middle Temple Hall which is twenty-seven feet long and made of single oak tree donated by Elizabeth I. The trunk was floated down the river from Windsor Great Park and the table was constructed in the hall almost half millennium ago. It has never been moved and through all the intervening centuries – through the Plague and the Fire and the Blitz – it has groaned beneath the weight of the dinners of old London.

Dinners and politics have always been inextricable in London – as in many other capitals – but, whether these meals were a premise to do business, make connections and forge allegiances, or whether these frequent civic gatherings were, in fact, merely the excuse for an endless catalogue of slap-up feasts and beanos, remains open to question. John Keohane, former Chief Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London told me that his troupe acquired their colloquial name of “beefeaters” because – as royal bodyguards – Henry VII  granted them the privilege of dining at his table and eating the red meat which was denied to the commonfolk. In the medieval world, your place at dinner corresponded  literally to your place in society, whether at top table or among the lower orders.

Contemplating all these empty halls where the table has not been laid yet and where rays of sunlight illuminate the particles of dust floating in the silence, I think we may have to wait a while before dinner is served in old London.

Christ’s Hospital Hall, c.1910

Buckingham Palace, State Dining Room, c.1910

Grocers’ Hall, c.1910

Ironmongers’ Hall, Court Luncheon Room, c.1910

Mercers’ Livery Hall, 1932

Merchant Taylors’ Hall, c.1910

Painters’ Hall, c.1910

Salters’ Livery Hall, c.1910

Skinners’ Hall, c.1910

Skinners’ Hall, c.1910

Stationers’ Hall, Stock Room, c.1910

Drapers’ Hall, c.1920

The Admiralty Board Room, c.1910

King’s Robing Room, Palace of Westminster, c.1910

Buckingham Palace, Throne Room, c.1910

Houses of Parliament, Robing Room, c.1910

Lincoln’s Inn, Great Hall, c.1910

Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall, c.1928

Drapers’ Hall, c.1920

Middle Temple Hall, c.1910

Mansion House Dining Room, c.1910

Ironmongers’ Hall, Banqueting Room, c.1910

Apothecaries’ Hall, Banquet in the Great Hall, c.1920

Boys preparing to cook, c.1910

Boar’s Head Dinner at Cutler’s Hall, c.1910

Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall, 1933

Baddeley Cake & Wine, Drury Lane, c.1930