Ye Olde Swiss Cottage pub’s colourful sign (left) and pedestrian extraordinaire John Mountjoy [Wikimedia Commons (CC. BY 4.0) Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust]

IT was by many accounts one of the capital’s great endurance contests of the mid-19th century.

Two giants of “pedestrianism” were locked in a battle, in full view of a host of spectators from a pub that would become a landmark of what we now call Swiss Cottage.

Two moustachioed giants of the sport, John Mountjoy and John Townsend, were pitted against each other in a bizarre challenge called by the landlord of the day, Frank Redmond.

The challenge was to walk 20 miles, run one mile, walk a mile backwards, run a hoop for one mile, wheel a barrow for one mile before picking up 40 stones one yard apart.

I’m grateful to the account of a “professional pub bore”, Tweedy Pubs on YouTube, for researching the details in his in-depth and unexpected history of the Ye Olde Swiss Cottage pub site.

He tells how in 1838, Mr Redmond had brought two bloodhounds and he employed the “celebrated pedestrian” Mountjoy to test them.

Mountjoy was a specialist in six-day walks between pubs in Finchley and St Albans.

“Pedestrianism was a popular sport – if you can call it that – which combined feats of walking sometimes combined with other challenges.

“Mountjoy went along a devious course to try and outwit the bloodhounds, with onlookers watching from the balcony of the pub.”

Mountjoy was back the next year “pitted against another veteran pedestrian Townsend”, himself a hero of the north, idolised for his prowess at six days walks around Liverpool.

Mr Redmond was a former boxer and dog breeder, pigeon fancier and supporter of pedestrianism.

Pedestrianism – more popular than football at the time – would later morph into a form of “race-walking”. A long distance Championship of the World was founded in the UK in 1878 and the sport was included in the 1908 Olympic Games in London.

Tweedy Pub’s history piece suggests there may have been a small arena at the back of the Ye Olde Swiss’s predecessor for cockfighting and bull-baiting.

The pub sold in 1948 for £176,000, believed to be an all time record for the sale of a licensed property at the time. In 1984 it was sold again shortly before Samuel Smith’s Brewery took the pub on.

The future of the current pub – suddenly shuttered in February this year – hangs in the balance after it was put up for sale by its owner, based in Oban, Scotland, last month.

The Belsize Society has successfully made an application for the pub to be listed as an “asset of community value” and last week made a formal expression of interest to the council to take it over.

The move triggered a process where a community interest company can come forward to buy it before it is put on the open market.