Donor hands Rules’ Maiden Lane home to the National Trust in £11m gift

Rules, the Covent Garden restaurant that has served diners on Maiden Lane since 1798, has had its building handed to the National Trust as a gift valued at £11 million.

The donation comes from J-P Mayhew, who bought Rules in 1984. He has given the charity the freehold of 34-35 Maiden Lane together with the objects collected there over two centuries, among them old menus and visitor books, caricatures and photographs, and the stained glass and signs. Each year the rent paid by the restaurant will be spent on conserving the building, the charity said.

What changes for diners at Rules

According to the Trust, very little. Mayhew sold the restaurant business in 2022 to Ricky McMenemy, its long-serving general manager, who will now rent the building as a commercial tenant. Lucy Porten, a national curator at the charity, said its everyday role would “probably be very light touch” and that the site would always operate as a restaurant.

The menu is expected to stay largely as it is, and Porten ruled out scones. National Trust members will not get preferential access or lower prices, because the restaurant has to succeed as a business. The charity is looking at virtual visits and other ways for people to experience the rooms from a distance.

The Trust’s portfolio already includes 39 historic pubs that still pour pints, the George Inn in Southwark among them. Until now, though, it has never looked after a working historic restaurant, the charity said.

Betjeman’s fight to save London’s oldest restaurant

Rules came close to disappearing in 1971. The Greater London Council wanted to widen the Strand, and the road scheme put the restaurant’s future at risk. The poet John Betjeman spoke up for it, praising its “invisible atmosphere”, and a room at the restaurant now carries his name. Mayhew said the donation was his response to that appeal.

Over more than two centuries the restaurant has survived the Blitz and drawn guests from Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin to Graham Greene, who celebrated birthdays there and wrote it into The End of the Affair. Hilary McGrady, the Trust’s director-general, said Mayhew’s generosity meant Rules now had a future measured in generations.