Sir Richard Steele

Specialties

The Sir Richard Steele is a North London Institution:

Our Sunday Roasts (with Bloody Mary’s for £5) are excellent.

Get a Beef Burger with cheese + a pint of Amstel for £10 BARGAIN.

Rockaoke Thursdays — sing with a live band, a wide variety of your favourite rock anthems!

To capture in words the unique eclectic mash which lines the walls and ceilings of this beautiful Victorian building would be nearly impossible — so you’d best come down and see it for yourself!

History

Established in 1867.

Sir Richard Steele (bap. 12 March 1672 — 1 September 1729) was an Irish writer and politician, remembered as co-​founder, with his friend Joseph Addison, of the magazine The Spectator.

Steele’s cottage was a low plain building, and the only ornament was a scroll over the central window. It was pulled down in 1867. The site of the house and its garden is marked by a row of houses, called Steele’s Terrace, and the «Sir Richard Steele» tavern. A house, very near to Steele’s, was tenanted by an author and a wit of not dissimilar character. When Gay, who had lost his entire fortune in the South Sea Bubble, showed symptoms of insanity, he was placed by his friends in retirement here. The kindly attentions of sundry physicians, who visited him without fee or reward, sufficed to restore his mental equilibrium even without the aid of the famous Hampstead waters.

Meet the Business Owner

Sir Richard S.

Business Owner

He was born in Dublin in March 1672, the son of an attorney. His parents died when he was young and he was brought up by an uncle, Henry Gascoigne, secretary to the first Duke of Ormonde. Ormonde sent him to Charterhouse, where he first met Addison, and in 1690 he went up to Oxford. In 1694 he suddenly enlisted in the Horse Guards. In 1695 he published a poem on the funeral of Queen Mary, dedicated to Lord Cutts, who made him his secretary and an ensign in the Coldstream Guards.

Steele entered Parliament for Stockbridge, and the Guardian was dropped for the more professedly political the Englishman. In 1714 Steele was expelled from the House for seditious utterances in The Crisis. With the death of Queen Anne, his party again came into power and he was re-​elected to parliament and knighted. He was made a patentee of the Drury Lane Theatre, where in 1722 he produced The Conscious Lovers, his best comedy. He died 1^st September 1729 at Carmarthen.