The Castle
The Castle is a decent pub next to Farringdon underground station, popular with travellers and workers in the neighbouring area of Clerkenwell.
It was recently closed for a spruce up and a new lick of paint; a confident sign in an age when more pubs are closing than being renovated.
If this blog post was simply a recommendation for a good pub we could stop there, but there is something very unusual about The Castle, indeed something that is claimed to be unique.
To find out what it is we need to look up to the first floor. What do we see? The three balls that are the traditional symbol of a pawnbroker.
So what is a pawnbroking sign doing outside a pub?
To find out, we have to go back 200 years, to the period known as Regency, named after the dissolute son of King George III, who initially ruled as Prince Regent when his father was ill (dramatised in the movie ‘The Madness of King George’) before becoming George IV on his father’s death in 1820.
Young George was a major disappointment to his upright and frugal father: he was a gambler, a spendthrift and a womaniser.
The Prince Regent was a man about town in London for most of his life, except when debts forced him to Brighton for a period.
At the time, The Castle pub was in a very rough area of London, due to its proximity to the deeply unpleasant sounds and smells of the nearby Smithfield slaughterhouses and butchers.
It was an area notorious for the rougher pastimes of the sporting gentleman : cock-fighting, brothels, gambling…
One night, a rotund man was gambling on cock fights in the area, when he ran out of funds.
He asked to borrow money from the landlord of The Castle, and offered his expensive pocket watch as security. At the time this transaction would have been illegal because of complex laws regulating the lending money with security.
Our gambler gentleman failed to win his money back, and left when the evening’s entertainment was over.
The next day, the landlord had the surprise to be visited by a royal servant, who brought two things: the funds to reclaim the watch, and a royal warrant approving the landlord and his premises as a pawnbroker.
Why? Because the Prince Regent (because that was him) could not possibly have borrowed money illegally.
Cowcross Street
Incidentally, as guides, we are often asked the origin of London street names, particularly unusual ones.
Often their origins are very obscure and we have to disappoint our clients, but not in the case of this street. Cowcross Street is named after the cows that used to cross it on their way to Smithfield.
Mark
