It’s not the drink, really, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to sit down. This is all just a little too perfect; the small horseshoe bar, the light refracted in the frosted glass of the windows, the beer pumps standing sentinel, the scrubbed floorboards awaiting the first splash of spilled drink. The deeply satisfying, almost Zen-like pleasure afforded by this arrangement of wood, glass and low ceiling is making me dizzy and I’ve not even raised a glass yet.

I am in the Bricklayer’s Arms, close to the river Thames at Putney, southwest London. One hundred yards away there is another pub, the Duke’s Head, where for 10 years I worked behind the bar and in the cellar, though I began by cleaning the toilets. The experience left me with an abiding interest in London’s pubs, something shared, it seems, with the majority of foreign visitors to the city. The pub and its baffling nomenclature of bricklayers, blacksmiths, carpenters, kings, queens, aristocrats and animals is a quintessentially London institution and on the must-see list with Big Ben and the Tower of London. According to the tourism agency Visit England, 13.8m overseas visitors visited an English pub in 2011, and most of those were in London. But what sort of pub were they looking for?

“Ideally,” Jeremy Brinkworth of Visit London tells me, “somewhere that offers a combination of history and location, with good beer and no noisy machines, so you have the ability to converse.”