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guest:
    More for delight than cost prepare the feast.
    Other rules forbade reciting insipid poetry, fighting, brawling, itinerate fiddlers, the discussion of serious or sacred subjects, the breaking of glass or windows, and the tearing down of
    tapestries in wantonness (presumably tearing them down with good reason was excusable).
    During Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the Devil became the favourite roost of ‘Mull Sack’ – so named because his chosen drink was spiced sherry. Mull Sack’s real name was
John Cottington, a sweep turned highwayman and cutpurse, who reputedly had stolen from both the Lord ProtectorCromwell and Charles II and who was
immortalized in popular ballads of the time.
    In 1746 the Royal Society held its annual dinner here and during the 1750s concerts were regularly hosted. Eventually the Devil was incorporated into Child’s Bank, which stands at No 1
Fleet Street.
Dioramas

    A FASHIONABLE DIVERSION AND FORERUNNER OF the cinema, the first diorama opened in 1781 at Lisle Street. Described by its inventor, Philippe de
    Loutherbough, as ‘Various imitations of Natural Phenomena represented by Moving Pictures’, it consisted of a series of mechanically operated scenes, such as a storm at sea.
    The most famous diorama opened in 1823 at Nos 9–10 Park Square East, Camden. In a darkened auditorium, 200 seated visitors were treated to a series of vast trompe
l’oeils painted by Jacques Daguerre, inventor of the first successful photographic technique. The entire seating could be rotated through nearly ninety degrees by a boy operating a ram
engine, allowing parts of a scene to be displayed while other parts were prepared off-stage and out of sight. Measuring seventy feet wide and forty feet high, the giant paintings included the
interior of Canterbury Cathedral. One visitor described the experience of seeing the former thus: ‘The organpeels from under some distant vaults. Then the daylight slowly
returns, the congregation disperses, the candles are extinguished and the church with its chairs appears as at the beginning. This was magic.’
    Although hailed as an artistic triumph, the venture was a commercial failure and in 1848 the building, its machinery and paintings were sold for £3000. The site was later converted into a
Baptist chapel, though the original frontage survives.
The Dog and Duck

    Southwark
    A FAMOUS PUBLIC HOUSE, NAMED AFTER EITHER the shape of the nearby ponds or the habit of allowing dogs to chase the ducks that lived on them.
    The pub gained a reputation not only for its sporting contests but also for its health-giving waters. Sold at 4d a gallon and recommended by no less a figure than Dr Johnson to
his friend Mrs Thrale, the waters were advertised in 1731 as being a cure for ‘rheumatism, stone, gravel, fistula, ulcers, cancers, eye sores, and in all kinds of scorbutic cases whatever,
and the restoring of lost appetite’.
    If healthy competition was more your thing, in 1711 the pub hosted a ‘grinning match’ in which contestants, to the accompaniment of music, competed for a gold-laced hat.The Dog and Duck was much enlarged over time to include a bowling alley and an organ for popular concerts. But in contrast to the nearby Vauxhall Gardens, it gained a poor reputation,
attracting as it did ‘riff-raff and the scum of the town’.
    Numerous highwaymen of the 18th century made mention of the pub and in 1787 it was refused a licence until the Mayor of Southwark intervened. It was again refused one in 1796, at which stage it
changed from a public house into a vintners, which needed no licence to operate. It closed down altogether three years later. With the pub demolished, the site became home to St Bethlehem when it
moved from Moorfield in 1811. A stone plaque from the Dog and Duck, portraying a sitting dog with a duck in its mouth and bearing the date 1617, was incorporated into its walls but was later moved
to the Cuming Museum in Lambeth.
Dog Finders

    O NE