The Viaduct Tavern is the kind of London pub that makes you stop on the pavement outside and look twice. The name doesn't suggest anything exceptional — but the facade, with its etched glass windows and Victorian flourish, announces itself as something different from the modern pubs and chains that surround it on Newgate Street. Stepping inside confirms it: the Viaduct Tavern is one of the most complete Victorian gin palace interiors surviving in London, and the contrast between its ornate, gilded interior and the serious business of justice conducted at the Old Bailey directly opposite gives it a character unlike any other pub in the city.

The gin palace format — large, ornate, deliberately theatrical — was the Victorian pub industry's response to temperance campaigners, who argued that working-class drinkers were degraded by the squalid conditions in which they drank. The gin palaces were built to counterargue: to suggest that the act of drinking could be surrounded by art, by beauty, by a sense of occasion. The ornate pillars, etched glass and painted panels of the Viaduct Tavern are the physical evidence of that argument. They were not merely decorative; they were a statement about what kind of establishment this was and what kind of clientele it deserved.

Today the Viaduct Tavern is a working pub that takes its history seriously. The bar staff know the ghost stories and will tell them. The cellar is occasionally opened for tours. The etched glass and painted panels are maintained rather than replaced. Coming here for a pint at lunchtime — when the legal community of the Old Bailey mixes with tourists who've wandered up from St Paul's — is one of the most atmospherically specific pub experiences London offers. The viaduct tavern poster captures the gothic gin-palace quality of this extraordinary building in deep green and gold, with a nod to the ghost stories that have accumulated around its cellar.

Imagine for a moment the clientele of The Red Lion over six centuries. In the 1430s, when the first records of a tavern on this Whitehall site appear, the street outside was the principal ceremonial route of the English court — a processional way between the Palace of Westminster and the royal residences to the north. Henry VIII acquired the building in 1531, at a moment when Whitehall was being transformed into one of the great palace complexes of European monarchies. The politicians and courtiers who drank here were the people who ran the Kingdom.

The connection between Whitehall's pubs and the machinery of British government is longstanding and structural rather than coincidental. The buildings on this street — Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office — are so close to The Red Lion that the walk between them takes under three minutes. In an era before the constant scrutiny of media and mobile phones, that proximity made the pub a natural extension of the working day. A place where conversations could continue away from committees and civil servants. Where decisions could be informally tested. Where the people who ran the country could briefly pretend they were ordinary people drinking in a pub.

The Red Lion is still there. Still a working pub. Still serving the constituency of Westminster professionals who have always been its clientele. The red lion whitehall poster captures this stately Westminster character — deep red and black, with the suggestion of the Parliamentary skyline and Big Ben in the background — making it the most politically charged pub poster in the collection, and one of the most meaningful London prints for anyone who finds the history of British government genuinely interesting.

The Salisbury on St Martin's Lane occupies a particular position in London's pub culture as the interior that film-makers return to whenever they need a convincingly Victorian or Edwardian London setting. Its lavish 1899 interior — etched mirrors, polished mahogany, Art Nouveau candelabra that cast a warm, amber light across carved woodwork and glimmering glass — is so complete and so well-preserved that it functions as its own period film set. When you stand at the bar at The Salisbury, you are standing in something that looks substantially as it did in 1900, which is an increasingly rare experience in a city where most Victorian pub interiors have been stripped or modernised beyond recognition.

The history of the site before the 1899 rebuild is itself interesting. Ben Caunt's Head — the name the pub carried before the Salisbury — was named after a Victorian bare-knuckle boxing champion, a detail that speaks to the rough-and-ready entertainment culture of the area before theatre and opera established the West End's current character. The pub that replaced it — renamed after the Marquess of Salisbury, three-time Prime Minister of the late Victorian era — was a deliberate statement of refinement, of the ambition to create a pub interior that could hold its own alongside the theatres of St Martin's Lane.

Today The Salisbury draws a mixed crowd of theatre-goers (it's ideally positioned between the English National Opera and the numerous theatres of the West End), tourists who've read about the interior, and regulars who live and work in Covent Garden. The interior rewards close attention: every surface has a detail worth noticing, from the etched glass pattern on the windows to the specific carving on the bar supports. Coming here before an evening at the theatre in the West End is one of the most satisfying ways to begin a London evening. The salisbury covent garden poster captures the Art Nouveau interior in glimmering gold and glass tones — the most visually distinctive pub print in the London collection.

The Cittie of Yorke on High Holborn requires a short act of imagination before you enter. The building in front of you dates from 1923-24 — not medieval, not Victorian, but interwar, built at a moment when England was processing the losses of the First World War and looking backward to a romanticised past it had never quite had. The architects who designed the current Cittie of Yorke were creating a fantasy of a medieval great hall: the vaulted ceiling that soars above the bar, the enormous wine vats that line one wall, the rows of wooden cubicles arranged along the sides of the room. It is a reconstruction of something that never quite existed in this precise form.

The most striking physical feature of the Cittie of Yorke's interior is the enormous triangular-topped bar that rises toward the vaulted ceiling — a feature unique in London's pubs, and designed to evoke the impression of a great medieval hall more than to serve a practical function. The wine vats along the upper gallery are similarly theatrical: enormous wooden barrels that would once have contained wine, now decorative but no less impressive for it. The cubicles that line the walls create an intimate counter-point to the grandeur of the ceiling above: small, high-backed wooden boxes in which conversations can be conducted in near-privacy despite the noise of a busy pub.

The Cittie of Yorke is a Samuel Smith's pub — the independent Yorkshire brewery that runs a network of London's most characterful traditional pubs with a strict policy against background music, which means the conversation of Holborn's legal community is what you hear when you sit in one of those cubicles. The effect, combined with the theatrical interior, is of having stepped into something that feels more Victorian than anything Victorian and more medieval than anything genuinely medieval. The cittie of yorke holborn poster captures this grand medieval-hall atmosphere in warm lantern light and deep vaulted wood tones — a print for anyone who loves the theatricality of London's most deliberately dramatic pub interior.