The George Inn

The George takes its name from England’s patron saint and the dragon-slaying legend attached to him — one of the commonest signboards in the country, and among the oldest on Borough High Street. John Stow catalogued “the George” among Southwark’s great coaching inns in his 1598 Survey of London, alongside its near neighbours the Tabard, the Spur and the White Hart.

Local historians have suggested the “Saint” was quietly dropped in the mid-16th century, part of a wider retreat from overtly religious signboards during the Reformation — plausible, given how common the pattern was across England, but not something documented for this specific building. The inn is occasionally referred to elsewhere as the “George and Dragon,” a variant tied to the same legend rather than a formal renaming.

An inn stood on this ground through the Tudor period, one of at least twenty-three coaching inns that once lined the eastern side of Borough High Street. Two fires and a railway company later, only one wing of one inn survives — this one.

A street’s name is set by a council once and largely left alone. A pub’s history is a chain of leases, sales and rent books — tenant innkeepers paying a hospital charity, a hospital charity selling to a railway, a railway giving way, eventually, to a conservation trust. The George’s chain of custody is unusually well documented for a building this old.

Charles Dickens is known to have used the George’s coffee room, and the inn gets a passing mention in Little Dorrit: the character Maggy tells Tip that “if he goes into the ‘George’ and writes a letter” word will reach the family. It is a brief line, but a real one — and the George is name-checked again in Our Mutual Friend.

One archway along Borough High Street stood the George’s more famous neighbour, the Tabard, from which Chaucer sent his pilgrims off toward Canterbury (see the Borough High Street page). The Tabard burned in the same 1676 fire and was never rebuilt as a coaching inn — which is a large part of why the George, having survived, now carries that older neighbourhood’s memory as well as its own.

Because the George has been photographed and drawn since the earliest days of both practices, its own image history works almost like a fourth timeline — four different centuries of the same courtyard.

The George Inn Yard still opens off Borough High Street, a few doors from London Bridge station and the edge of Borough Market. The pub itself trades as a café and public house, run by Greene King on a lease from the National Trust, which owns the building as a conservation property rather than a museum piece — it earns its keep. Visitors are advised to book ahead for groups; the address is 77 Borough High Street, SE1 1NH.

It shares its yard, and much of its story, with the George Inn Yard street page — that page covers the yard itself; this one follows the business that gave the yard its name.