London pub

Dirty Dicks: The London pub that wasn’t cleaned for 200 years… with dead cats and dogs left on the floor

Dirty Dicks is one of Londons strangest pubs. The pub’s name might appear rather cheeky, but there’s a tragic reason behind it.

Many a Londoner has emerged from Liverpool Street station, let their gaze wander left down Bishopsgate, and spotted some electric scarlet letters spelling out the pub name, “Dirty Dicks”.

Yes, the omission of the apostrophe in the lights is unfortunate. But the story of Dirty Dick’s is tragic, uncomfortable and truly fascinating: this is a nineteenth century version of a theme pub. And the theme? A local man’s emotional breakdown.

Dirty Dick’s real name was Nathaniel Bentley, who was born in 1735 and was a successful London merchant and man about town, the owner of a warehouse and hardware shop in Leadenhall Street. The close attention he paid to his appearance – together with the society women who seemed to arrive at his sides on a conveyor belt – earned him the nickname “the beau of Leadenhall Street”. Essentially, he was a player. Until he met Her.

By “Her”, we mean the woman he fell head over heels in love with and decided to marry. Since much of this story was passed down orally her identity has been lost, but suffice to say he was blissfully happy to be getting married and the relationship was not, as so many matches were at the time, a marriage of convenience.

Which is why he put so much effort into the reception, and laid the tables with blue and white, her favourite colours, along with flowers, wine, cutlery, a gorgeous wedding cake. On the day of their wedding, shortly before heading to the church, Nathaniel put on his morning suit.

Little did he know, he would never take it off. There was a knock at the door. The news that his fiancée had died, on the very morning of their wedding, broke Nathaniel apart.

He locked the door of the reception room and wouldn’t allow anyone to enter, much less clear anything away. He refused to take off his suit, or wash his hands – or any part of him, or in fact anything at all – ever again.

“It’s of no use,” he said. “If I wash my hands, they will be dirty again tomorrow.” This was no brief dip into bereavement. Nathaniel grieved this way for the rest of his life, and his warehouse soon fell into absolute filth.

A mummified cat found at the premises.

Dust and grime accumulated, spiders built cities of cobwebs. Cats and rats died on the floor, and still, he refused to clean or allow anyone else to. He acquired the nickname Dirty Dick and he and his den of grot became something of a tourist attraction in London.

Any letter addressed to “The Dirty Warehouse, London” would be delivered to Dirty Dick, who was by now a kind of celebrity of squalor. Though he had transformed himself from a beau to a bin, his perfect manners and politeness remained, leaving him a typically well-educated delight of a man with an incongruous, slovenly exterior.

Charles Dickens was fascinated by his story, and it’s widely believed to be where he got the inspiration for the character of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. In 1853 he even published a poem by William Allingham, all about Dirty Dick, in his weekly magazine Household Words, which included the lines: “Fine folks from their carriages, noble and fair,/ Have entered his shop, less to buy than to stare,/ And afterwards said, though the dirt was so frightful,/ The Dirty Man’s manners were truly delightful.”

The lease on Dirty Dick’s warehouse expired in 1802, and it took two years to turf him out of the premises. The local business owners, who over the years had begged him to do cleaning and repairs (and even offered to do so at their own expense), must have been delighted to see the back of him – but more excited still were the hordes of tourists who crowded in to marvel at the filthy warehouse, and get a peek at the wedding breakfast left untouched for decades.

Reason why pub was renamed:

Then, a few years after Nathaniel left and died in Scotland, the proprietors of The Old Jerusalem pub around the corner from his warehouse (and which Nathaniel himself had once owned) had a bright idea. They renamed the pub Dirty Dick’s and filled it with cobwebs and cat corpses acquired from his warehouse shop, recreating the look to capitalise on the legend, a full-on commodification of a breakdown.

One 1866 description of the pub was, “A small public house or rather a tap of a wholesale wine and spirit business… a warehouse or barn without floorboards – a low ceiling, with cobweb festoons dangling from the black rafters – a pewter bar battered and dirty, floating with beer – numberless gas pipes tied anyhow along the struts and posts to conduct the spirits from the barrels to the taps – sample phials and labelled bottles of wine and spirits on shelves – everything covered with virgin dust and cobwebs”.

Now of course – of course – Dirty Dick’s has been cleaned, the mummified remains of cats and rats long since tucked away behind a glass case, because today we live in a world with health and safety regulations that must be followed. But astonishingly, the order from the government for a deep cleansing of the pub didn’t happen until the 1980s, just shy of 200 years after Dirty Dick died, still broken with grief, in the sad, flimsy rags of his morning suit.

Dirty Dick’s Location: Swedeland Court, 202 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 4NR

Located on the bustling Bishopsgate, just across from Liverpool Street Station and just a stone’s throw from Shoreditch, Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane.


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