The London is halfway up Ludgate Hill, and is tolerable enough in its way. Its way is a Youngers / S&N pub which likes to pretend it’s more traditional than it is. It was closed the other day when I was considering nipping in for a swift snifter: they appeared to be putting in some kind of air conditioning into the cellar room. This could be a good sign (the cellar will be cooler) or a bad sign (the management may decide to make the cellar ‘cooler’ – i.e. into some terrible bar-type place).
It seems fairly reasonable for an area within a city to have a pub named after it: I was recently a-drinkin’ in the Sherwood Tavern in Sherwood (Nottingham) while the Edgeley Arms (Stockport), the London Fields and the Stoke Newington Tup offer themselves for consideration. I think The Lambeth Walk and the Surprise At Pimlico go too far, though. Sometimes the process works in reverse, of course: most famously Elephant and Castle (can the name really derive from the Infanta Di Castille?) is an area named after a pub. A less well-known qualifier in this category may be Blue Anchor, an area of Bermondsey now often referred to simply as “Blue”.
Many village pubs bear the name of their village alone, and for that I think we can forgive them, because often the local inhabitants have trouble with remembering lots of different words (this may be why many villagers have the same surname, but that might be something else). The Bay Horse in Bay Horse, near Lancaster comes to mind, although there are those who claim that the Bay Horse is not in Bay Horse at all, but rather in nearby Dolphinholme. On Dartmoor there are two villages on the River Tavy named Mary Tavy and Peter Tavy. One has a delightful boozer which bears the name of its village. Can I remember which village? I cannot.