Loved by students and writers for 450 years, Oxford pub succumbs to Covid

A historic pub in the centre of Oxford that has served students, scholars and literary greats for more than 450 years is shutting down, a cultural casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UK’s Lamb & Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien and his friend CS Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, has suffered a disastrous loss of revenues since the start of the pandemic.

The pub opened in 1566 and was moved to its present location on St Giles, a broad thoroughfare in the city centre, in 1613. It is owned by St John’s College, one of 45 colleges and private halls that make up the University of Oxford.

“The Lamb & Flag, like many other businesses in the hospitality industry, has been hard hit by the pandemic,” said Steve Elston, deputy bursar of St John’s, announcing the pub would close on January 31.

“The trading figures of the last 12 months have meant the pub is not currently financially viable.”

England was in lockdown for most of March, April, May and June last year, then again in November, and has been in its third national lockdown since January 5. University life has been severely disrupted, even outside official lockdowns.

Dave Richardson, of the Oxford branch of the Campaign for Real Ale, said the Lamb & Flag was one of the city’s most traditional pubs and it would be a tragedy to see it disappear.

“It has no TV, it has no jukebox, it has no music. It’s a place where people come to talk to each other, to enjoy the traditional, historic surroundings. Generations of people have done that, students, townspeople, people from afar,” he said.

Named after symbols traditionally associated with St John the Baptist, the Lamb & Flag is rumoured to have hosted the great writer Thomas Hardy, who set his dark novel, Jude the Obscure, partly in a fictionalised Oxford called Christminster.

Since 1997, St John’s College has used profits generated by the pub to fund scholarships for graduate students. It said those receiving them would not be affected by the closure and it would directly fund future scholarships.

— Reuters