I mean, if an evening holds the prospect of beer, cheese, a bit of history and a spot or two of art*, then it would take a very strong soul to resist.
(*PR firms please note – perm any two of these four and I’ll be beating the door down at your event.)
So it is that we find ourselves in The Porterhouse, an excellent independent pub in Covent Garden’s Maiden Lane, drinking porter – the traditional ale of 18th century London – and hearing about the artist Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Because it was on the site of The Porterhouse at 21 Maiden Lane where, in 1775, Turner was born. This was his parents’ house and where his father, a barber, ran his business of making wigs.
An artistic prodigy, the young Turner won a place at the Royal Academy of Art Schools at age 14, and was elected a full member of the Academy in 1802 when he was only 27. He died in 1851 after a long, successful and prolific career (over 2,000 watercolours and 550 paintings).
You can see many of his works in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain (which also held a ‘Turner and Constable’ exhibition recently), and at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, which has perhaps his most famous painting – and Turner’s personal favourite, ‘my darling’ he called it – ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (or “The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 “ to give it its correct and more cumbersome title). One can bend the knee at Turner’s grave in the crypt in St Paul’s cathedral where he is buried almost next to Sir Christopher Wren.
Anyway, back to the pub. We’re in The Porterhouse’s new ‘Mr Turner’s Bar’ drinking ‘Mr Turner’s Porter’ – a limited edition bottled beer by Wandsworth’s Sambrook Brewery – looking at a wall plaque that commemorates the artist’s birthplace.
This plaque (see the picture) was apparently originally on a building in Maiden Lane that was erroneously thought to be the site of Turner’s home, and when that building was refurbished, the plaque was junked. Fortunately, it was saved and stored away in the Westminster Archives where it was almost completely forgotten about until the Turner Society ferreted it out.
The Society’s chair, Pieter van der Merwe, suggested to Myra Hughes, who runs The Porterhouse, that it should be reinstalled at the pub, joining a green plaque to the artist that was put on the front of the building in 1999, which it was in 2025 as part of the 250th anniversary commemoration of Turner’s birth (the launch of which was at another favourite venue of this blog, Farm Street Church in Mayfair)..
As part of that event The Porterhouse commissioned London artist Adam Dant (creator of ornate, detailed maps of the city) to do an artwork celebrating ‘Turner’s London’, and this magnificent piece – over 3m square – can now be seen on the pub’s terrace. It’s also been adapted to provide a self-guided tour of Covent Garden, six stops that take you from the river to Maiden Lane by way of Somerset House, Drury Lane, Inigo Jones’s St Paul’s Church and Henrietta Street – all sites associated in some way with Turner.
You can pick up a printed copy of the tour in The Porterhouse (produced for the pub by local magazine The Covent Gardener) and use it to stroll around the streets to compare and contrast 18th century and 21st century Covent Garden. Or you could just pour yourself a bottle of Mr Turner’s porter and let your imagination do the walking as you stare at Adam Dant’s painting on The Porterhouse’s terrace.
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