Here’s looking at dining in London

• The first restaurants—as we think of them today—appeared in London in the late 18th century, a natural continuation of the inns and taverns that had hitherto been popular. Food stalls lined the Thames as early as the 12th century

• We might think that the regularity with which restaurant and hotel chefs bring out cookbooks is a new phenomenon, but the practice was, in fact, happening more than 200 years ago. In 1783, John Farley of the popular London Tavern, in Bishopsgate, published The London Art of Cookery for ‘every housekeeper, cook and servant in the kingdom’

• Multiple restaurants claim to be London’s oldest restaurant, including Wiltons, which opened in 1742 as an oyster, shrimp and cockles stall in Haymarket. In 1805, it morphed into a fishmonger with a sit-in oyster bar and, in 1840, a ‘proper’ restaurant just off St James’s Street. It moved to its current location, on Jermyn Street, in 1984. Rules opened in Covent Garden in 1798 (100 years later, the first Country Life offices would open opposite it). The restaurant specialised in game, which wasn’t rationed during the Second World War—ensuring Rules’s survival and growing popularity