But every night, someone uninitiated will shuffle down the steps into Gordon's Wine Bar's fusty parlour and let out a little gasp. Candles glimmer. Corks pop. Glasses clink. People... talk to one another. A friendly punter passes you a leather-bound menu. A barman hands you a petite glass of Argentinean malbec. Your life will never be the same again. You don't forget your first time at Gordon's.

Who was Gordon?

Surely all cannot be what it seems. Surely Gordon's is a themed bar, hollowed out and knocked up by some enterprising soak of a yuppie in the early 2000s? Surely all those prints of gauche kings, queens, princes and princesses were bought in a job lot off eBay, pasted up to create the illusion of a drunken hermit's lair lost to time, and only crowbarred open decades later?

Wrong. The seed of Gordon's was planted in 1394. The Gordon in question was Arthur 'Staff' Gordon, the owner of a property on this site who was a 'free vintner', permitted to sell wine anywhere he liked by Edward III. (The pissed-up monarch had some wine-quaffing debts to settle.) The place didn't become an actual wine bar until 1890 — the same year Rudyard Kipling was scribbling The Light That Failed in the room above.

It closed again at some point (not before hosting the likes of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh for a swig) but in a corkscrewed twist of fate in 1972, a gravelly-voiced sherry lover by the name of Luis Gordon (unrelated to the previous Gordon family) took the place over. He turned it into the dank retreat from reality we've come to escape to, whenever we're in need of a drink or three.