Pub London's pubs had closed. The closures have been ascribed to factors such as changing tastes, rise in the cost of beer due to applied taxes and the increase in the Muslim population. Inns and taverns feature throughout English literature and poetry, from The Tabard Inn in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" onwards. The highwayman Dick Turpin used the Swan Inn at Woughton-on-the-Green in Buckinghamshire as his base. Jamaica Inn near Bolventor in Cornwall gave its name to a 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier and a 1939 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the 1920s John Fothergill (1876–1957) was the innkeeper of
Jamaica Inn which she had spun her popular novel "Jamaica Inn", which was adapted into a melodramatic film of the same name made by Alfred Hitchcock. Before living in the inn, she had resided in Fowey estuary, a house in Bodinnick and subsequently in Menabilly. She described the nocturnal activities of a smuggling ring based at the now celebrated inn, "portraying a hidden world as a place of tense excitement and claustrophobia of real peril and thrill." It should be noted though that in Du Maurier's novel, the Jamaica Inn is not functioning as an inn with many guests as it did