The Princess Louise is a public house on High Holborn, London, famous for its remarkable interior, with wood panelling and a series of 'booths' around an island bar. It is a tied house, being owned by the Samuel Smith Brewery of Tadcaster, Yorkshire. The building is protected by its Grade II listing and has what has been described as "a rich example of a Victorian public house interior", by William B Simpson and Sons; who contracted out the work. As it is considered so historically significant even the men's toilets, with their marble urinals, are listed. The pub, which is also listed on CAMRA's national inventory of historic pub interiors, was refurbished in 2007.
Being located near Bloomsbury, the British Museum and the University of London, it is patronised by professors and other educationalists.
In June 2009, the pub was joint winner of the best refurbishment class of the 2008 Pub Design Awards awarded annually by CAMRA. Author Peter Haydon included the Princess Louise in his book The Best Pubs in London and rated it No. 5 in the capital, saying it had "possibly the best preserved Victorian pub interior in London".
The Princess Louise is also notable for having been the venue for a number of influential folk clubs run by Ewan MacColl and others, which played an important part in the British folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Famous quotes containing the words princess and/or louise:
“How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!”
—Bible: Hebrew Lamentations 1:1.
Said of Jerusalem.
“If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)