Boar's Head Inn, London

If you ever wondered where Shakespeare’s favorite party animal, Falstaff, liked to hang out, look no further than the Boar’s Head Inn on Eastcheap. In Henry IV, Part 1, it’s the ultimate medieval dive bar, a place for bad jokes, good ale, and even worse decisions. Now, small catch: historians will tell you the real Boar’s Head didn’t exist in the early 1400s, when the play is set. But in Shakespeare’s time, absolutely - it had been there since at least 1537, well established as a landmark before getting flambéed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. (Don’t worry, they rebuilt it - Londoners weren’t about to let a good pub die.)

The inn carried on valiantly until the late 1700s, when it swapped beer for buttoned-up retail, and eventually the wrecking ball finished the job in 1831. But the legendary boar’s head sign survived and now lives proudly at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, because some things deserve a second act...

Today, the original site is swallowed up by the modern approach to London Bridge at Cannon Street. But just nearby on Eastcheap, a new tribute arose: in 1868, architect Robert Lewis Roumieu designed a neo-Gothic fever dream of a building - think flying brick gables and a boar’s head bursting out of a hedge. One architectural historian called it “one of the maddest displays of gabled Gothic brick in London," while another critic summed it up as “the scream you wake on at the end of a nightmare.”

In short: if Falstaff ever saw it, he’d probably order another round just to process it...