The City of London, the fabled ‘Square Mile’, is the financial hub of world trade. It is also an area with a rich and almost tangible history, a history that is reflected in its colourful and varied selection of pubs and watering holes. The city can boast one of the greatest densities of pubs anywhere in the world, and these pubs range from seventeenth-century taverns dating from just after the Great Fire of 1666 through to swish and hip modern bars catering for today’s modern ‘city worker’. Amazingly there has been no dedicated book about the City of London’s pubs in over forty years. Given the area’s growing residential population, the hundreds of thousands who work there during the week and the huge number of tourists that visit every year, the time is right for a new guide to the city’s diverse and myriad pubs.