A pub has stood on Wine Office Court, just off Fleet Street, since 1538, when the site was still a Carmelite monastery. The current building went up in 1667, one of the first reconstructed after the Great Fire, and its dim, low-ceilinged rooms have barely changed since.

Dickens liked it enough to write it into A Tale of Two Cities as the first place Charles Darnay eats after his treason trial. Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Tennyson and Theodore Roosevelt all drank here, too. Behind the bar, a stuffed grey parrot named Polly still keeps watch, decades after her 1926 death prompted obituaries in some 200 newspapers worldwide.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese's literary connections along Fleet Street, from Dr Johnson's nearby court to Dickens's London, while one tour reveals how the Cheesegrater skyscraper was forced to lean sideways to preserve the pub's centuries-old sightline to St Paul's dome.