Rules restaurant's £11m building is given to the National Trust

The Rules restaurant National Trust gift, announced on 14 October, hands the conservation charity the freehold of 34-35 Maiden Lane in Covent Garden, the £11m building where London's oldest restaurant has served since 1798. The restaurant stays open, now as the Trust's tenant.

The donor is J-P Mayhew, who has owned the building for about four decades. Besides the bricks, the gift covers the collection inside: visitor books, menus, caricatures, photographs, stained glass and signs. For the streets around it, start with our guide to what to eat in London and our list of the best restaurants in London.

The Trust, founded in 1895, says Maiden Lane is the first building in its care to house a historic restaurant that still trades; it already looks after 39 historic pubs. Its director-general, Hilary McGrady, called the site "an outstanding piece of living history".

After 228 years, London's oldest dining room has a landlord whose job is to keep it exactly as it is.

How the Rules restaurant National Trust deal works

The building and the business have different owners. Ricky McMenemy, who has worked at Rules for 35 years, owns the restaurant and becomes a commercial tenant of the Trust. The gift includes the annual rent from that business, which the charity will spend on conservation of the building every year, so the dining room pays for its own upkeep.

McMenemy said the arrangement gives the independent business "security and peace of mind". Mayhew said the Trust would protect the bricks and mortar, the interior and the atmosphere in a way no one else could. None of the reports consulted on the Rules restaurant National Trust gift gives the length of the lease or the amount of the rent.

From an oyster bar in 1798 to a protected address

Thomas Rule opened the place as an oyster bar in 1798. According to the restaurant's own history, Charles Rule, a descendant, met the Paris restaurateur Tom Bell shortly before the First World War, the business later passed to the Bell family, and in 1984 Bell's daughter sold it to John Mayhew. It stayed open through the Second World War, serving rationed meals at five shillings.

In 1971 Greater London Council plans to turn the Strand into a dual carriageway threatened Maiden Lane, and the poet John Betjeman spoke in its defence. Rooms upstairs now carry his name and that of Graham Greene. Guests over two centuries include Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin, Edward VII, David Bowie and Madonna.

Today Rules seats about 90 people and employs about 90 staff, with game, oysters, pies and puddings on the menu. The Trust says both the historic structure and its original use will be kept: after 228 years, the oldest dining room in London has a landlord whose job is to make sure nothing changes.