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Was Paine a regular?
• It was great to see the photograph of the splendid new Islington trade union banner, recently unveiled at the Town Hall, celebrating Islington’s revolutionary past (Banner flies for a radical past that’s buried under today’s coffee culture, February 29). Thomas Paine is featured on the new union banner, beside a sign for the Angel Inn. The story goes that Paine wrote the Rights of Man while staying at the old Angel Inn (now the site of the Co-op Bank on the corner of the Angel Junction).
My brother and myself run the Old Red Lion pub in St John Street. When we took over the pub in 2000, we inherited a Thomas Paine plaque, which is still on display in the pub to this day. It states that “The earliest historical sources in 1828 identify the Old Red Lion as the place where Thomas Paine wrote Part 1 of the Rights of Man in 1791”.
In the late Georgian era, the Old Red Lion would have been a small brick house, apparently with three trees in its forecourt. The story goes, that it was in the shade of these trees that Thomas Paine (no doubt relaxing with a nice pint) did his writing, while lodging across the road at the Angel Inn. I have attempted some research to try to discover what the “earliest historical sources” might be, but to no avail.
Peter Powell, the late local historian, and great friend of the Old Red Lion Theatre, was a frequent visitor to the pub on his “revolutionary” local history walks, and he was conducting some research on our behalf.
A couple of days before Peter passed on, he visited us at the Old Red Lion and told me that an original plaque (sadly lost in the mists of time and replaced by the current one) was put up to commemorate Thomas Paine’s writings at the pub on the insistence of one Charles Dickens, another regular at the Old Red Lion! I also know Peter liked to tell a story...
I wonder if any of your readers could shed light on this small historical matter? And Peter, we’ll miss your visits, your charm and your humour!
Lorcan Devine
Old Red Lion
St John Street, EC1
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