The first dining rooms

Sweetings nd Wiltons right survive happily today

Oysters for the queen

Oysters featured widely in pubs, taverns and larger houses, usually on the shell. There is a pub in London’s east end by Liverpool Street Station, Dirty Dicks, which still declares itself as what might have been the oldest of oyster houses, dated 1648, although it has long since lost its sense of history in a series of rather too blatant makeovers. Other restaurants began life as oyster bars and survive. Wiltons, originally in Great Ryder Street, now in Jermyn Street, claims to have first opened in 1742 and supplied Buckingham Palace with oysters for 200 years from George III onwards.

From a humble oyster shed...

That most English of restaurants Rules in Maiden Lane was originally an oyster shop and fishmongery founded in 1798. Sweetings seems also to have begun life as an oyster trading room before settling down to become a restaurant in 1840. Wheelers was set up by the captain of a Whitstable oyster smack called Bubbles in 1856 and only moved to Old Compton Street in Soho in 1924 before re-incarnating as one of the first restaurant chains. Sheekeys and Bentleys opened later 1896 and 1916 respectively.