One of the pleasures of working at the Middlesex and then UCL has been their locations in central London. Maybe this has even fuelled my career via the sheer number and variety of seductive cafes and bars available as unofficial workplaces. The Middlesex nestled on the edge of Fitzrovia, just north of Soho, while Bloomsbury, home to more prosperous and genteel dwellers, sits a matter of yards, or metres, away on the other side of Tottenham Road. I must say something here of my celebrated work environs since my various offices were contained within its borders for over thirty years (1978-2013). Indeed, I still return with some regularity post-retirement. I’d best begin with Fitzrovia, in which I was accommodated between 1978 and 2006.
I became more than familiar with Fitzrovia’s cafes and bars. Initially I read and wrote in a few chosen haunts, for many years writing with biros in exercise books. When I was joined by Paul Higgs I grew increasingly accustomed to coffee breaks, lunches and conversation, either in the canteen in the Windeyer Building, or along Mortimer Street, or more rarely along the more plush and expensive Charlotte Street. Twenty-eight years in an area lend it a comfortable familiarity (replete with what I later called health-bestowing ‘familiarity bonds’). There was a good deal of change to Fitzrovia during this period. Most conspicuously, the Middlesex Hospital was raised to the ground, its medical school, as I’ve recounted, having already been absorbed into UCL. Cafes have of course come and gone apace and hardly any of those I originally frequented remain. Paul and UCL Professor of Psychiatry Joanna Moncrieff and I still occasionally meet at Pret a Manger, located on the Fitzrovia side of Tottenham Court Road.
The local pubs, however, have a longer shelf life. The Green Man in Riding House Street was closest to my last office in Fitzrovia, and this became a familiar port of call. Of the many memories two stand out, the first involved our M.Sc students, and one in particular. After our six hours of seminars on a Friday, teachers and students alike sometimes adjourned to the Green Man for a pint or two. At the end of one term more alcohol was consumed than usual. After a bit a barman approached us with a degree of uncertainty and diffidence. ‘Are you missing one of your group?’ We weren’t initially sure. ‘Because’, he went on, ‘I think one of your ladies is asleep on the floor of the women’s toilet downstairs.’ A fellow student was dispatched and was able to confirm that this was so. Our conspicuously urbane, sophisticated, if bemused, student was gently awoken and escorted back to the group, and later accompanied to Goodge Street tube station and seen safely on her way home. The second memory Is preserved on the wall of our present home in the Surrey village of Mickleham. Shortly before I departed Fitzrovia for Bloomsbury I noticed that a series of evocative portraits of bar scenes had disappeared from the pub’s walls. I made enquiries and was told that following a refurb they had been left in the basement. ‘How about selling them to me?’ A bargain price of £30 was agreed and we shook hands. I deposited four of them in my office and took them home in two trips. A couple now hang in our hallway upstairs.
The One Tun was almost as accessible to us as the Green Man, and it too became a familiar stop-off. It was a place we tended to take our visiting speakers to for a pin and a chat: I recall taking Nik Rose and downing a few. It was also the site of a theft when a colleague suddenly became aware that her bag had been stolen (I’d long since developed the habit of transferring my wallet and ‘anchoring’ any other possessions with a foot or table leg when drinking in inner London). She informed the landlord who exited the pub at speed. He returned with some of the items from her bag and promptly left again. More items. He apologised: ‘I’m sorry, I got back what I could. I knew who it was and tracked them, but I had to give up when I was threatened with a knife.’
The Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place was a less visited hostelry, but it is one with a history. In his Bohemian London, Nick Rennison recounts the adventures of some of its more renowned regulars. Perhaps predictably, he records that Dylan Thomas greeted diarist, former art student and, in 1943, a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), Joan Wyndham, with the blunt proclamation: ‘I’m Dylan Thomas and I’m fucking skint. Be nice to me and buy me another Special Ale.’ He was not only talented alcoholic to make the Wheatsheaf his regular abode. It was the first-choice watering hole for many an aspiring literary figure during and after WW2. The final Fitzrovia pub deserving of a mention because I used it now and again is the Fitzrovia Tavern on Charlotte Street. I often found it austere, at least outside of warm and sunny Friday evenings, but it too has a fascinating history. This was the pub favoured by many an artist in the 1930s. Augustus John and his acolytes were perhaps the most permanent fixtures. Wine (or beer), women, but not necessarily song. Suffice it to say that Fitzrovia was the natural – thronging and ‘unsafe’ – venue for artists and literary figures in the 1930s, ‘40s and beyond. George Orwell found it congenial, although if I remember it accurately, he, like many another, traipsed from Fitzrovia to Soho to escape the early closing of pubs (10.30pm as opposed to 11pm).
I could dwell on Fitzrovia much longer, but I’d best move on. Suffice it to add that it has an enduring historical appeal. It was once the haunt of European communists and anarchists. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all spent time there in the first decade of the twentieth century; and the Communist Club had its HQ in Charlotte Street. Charlotte Street was also the setting for the dying days of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and the setting for its fateful division into the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, led by Lenin.
Now for a few observations around Soho, with which I became familiar even before I transferred from Charing Cross to the Middlesex. While based at the former, I regularly took the tube to Charing Cross Road, usually with the second-hand bookshops at the forefront of my mind. In fact, those bookshops were like a second home. I got to know the booksellers and glimpsed the occasional familiar face (in Any Amount of Books I recall a brief chat with Michael Foot, another self-confessed bibliophile). It was the proprietor of Any Amount of Books, incidentally, who purchased hundreds of my books when I retired from UCL in 2013 and had to clear and vacate my office; she got them for the bargain price of £1,000.
Anyway, Soho was a London village I traversed routinely. It was a good deal more sleazy in the 1970s than it is now. Much of London, it seems, has been socially (and ethically) ‘cleansed’ during rentier capitalism’s tenure. ‘Walk-ups’ and ‘clip joints’ are spread more parsimoniously now, and there seem to be fewer unkempt and authentically bohemian haunts. Maybe this is a process that began to accelerate through the 1960s, because in the 1950s Soho still had more than its share of artists and literary figures who committed much of their lives to experiments with their sexuality and remaining in their cups. Some, like Dublin-born Francis Bacon and Berlin-born Lucian Freud, Sigmund’s grandson, managed sufficient self-discipline between bouts of drinking to become significant artists. I was personally more familiar with the book and musical outlets. As I grew more interested in jazz after my New Orleans excursions, I stopped often in search of new jazz cassettes in those pre-CDC days (I also accumulated a number of David Bowie recordings for daughter Rebecca). The bebop in general, and sax players and Charlie Parker in particular, fascinated me most, though I was also drawn to Billy Holiday. Now I have several hundred CDCs even as others have switched to the likes of Spotify. I can concentrate and work listening to jazz but not to other musical genres.
Like Fitzrovia, Soho has a rich cultural heritage. Seventeen-year-old Thomas Dr Quincy spent much time on the streets in 1802 after fleeing his lodgings in Manchester. He slept in shop doorways before taking temporary shelter in Greek Street. In his Confessions of an Opium Eater, he recounts how Anne, a street worker he had befriended, saved his life when, hungry and exhausted, he collapsed outside a house on Soho Square. In 1811 Shelley, fresh from being sent down from Oxford for authoring his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, took lodgings in Poland Street prior to eloping to Scotland with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbook. Of the litany of adventures recounted in Bohemian London, special mention might be made of John Snow and Karl Marx. I remember visiting the site of John Snow’s water pump in what was then Broad Street, now Broadwick Street. In 1854 the physician John Snow, in a seminal moment for public health, demonstrated that a specific local water pump was the source of a severe cholera outbreak. This gave the lie to the common notion that cholera was spreads by ‘miasma’ or ‘bad air’. Dick Levinson, my old friend from Emory University, celebrated Snow’s achievement with me with a pint or two in the John Snow pub (from memory, the site of the pump is indicated on a – scarcely visible – stone outside the pub).
It is well known that Marx spent time living in Soho with his family in a two-bedroomed flat in Dean Street rented from an Italian cook called Giovanni Marengo. The family was subsisting on the edge of poverty despite Engel’s help. The accommodation was sparse and unkempt. Marx was mostly preoccupied with his life’s work, much of it being done in the British Museum Reading Room. But he did relax on occasion. His fellow German founder of the Social Democratic Party, Willhelm Liebknecht, recalls one epic pub crawl up Tottenham Court Road in the 1850s. They ended up, along with another German exile, Edgar Bauer, in the backroom of one drinking den in the company of a group of English clubmen known as the Oddfellows. Banter turned into debate, thence to argument. The three Germans exited at a canter and, much the worse for wear, began hurling paving stones from a pile they chanced upon at the street lights. They smashed four or five before a policeman on the beat heard the noise and summoned support. They were chased into Fitzrovia where Marx’s familiarity with the area helped them to escape.
Back to personal experience. I have long spent time writing in Soho, more in cafes than bars: too many to mention here. I will pick out one, Café Boheme, just off Cambridge Circus. Gone now, it was a venue for live jazz. It was a favourite port of call for another longstanding Emory friend, Terry Boswell, who would take his scripts for marking here. Like me, jazz drew him in and we would meet there for a beer and a chat. We were especially impressed by a young jazz singer whose name we never knew. Stacey Kent also sang there regularly and has gone on to greater things. Annette and I also went with Terry and other Emory friends to Ronnie Scott’s in Frith Street several times (I have the t-shirt to prove it). These were the days of smoky darkness, just how a jazz venue should be we thought. You could sit with a drink for a set without being hassled, which was of course ideal for students. It’s all a bit sanitised now, and maybe Ronnie’s death was a turning point, but it’s still going strong. Ronnie, a tenor sax player himself, opened the club in October of 1959 in Gerrard Street: it moved to larger premises in Frith Street in 1967. Many a noted American jazz player has performed there. Jimi Hendrix’s last performance took place there in 1970. Ronnie himself was taught to play by Vera Lynn’s father-in-law. Charlie Mingus once said of him: ‘of the white boys, Ronnie Scott gets closer to the negro blues feeling, the way Zoot Sims does’. It was when he was depressed following surgery for tooth implants that Ronnie died from an overdose of barbiturates; he was 69. The last time Annette and I visited the club was to hear Clint Eastwood’s son Kyle perform there.
I must say a few words about my latest base, Bloomsbury, a very different city landscape from Soho and Fitzrovia. My office, it will be remembered, was in Mortimer Market in Bloomsbury from 2006 until my retirement from UCL in 2013. I found myself more fully absorbed into the UCL community. Bloomsbury was not always a place for toffs and the privileged. At the start of the twentieth century, when Sir Leslie Stephens’ four children – Thoby, Adrian, Virginia and Vanessa – moved out of their house in Hyde Park Grove and took a house at 46 Gordon Square in 1904, their peers were astonished and concerned: this was not a place upper middle-class women could be expected to inhabit with equanimity. Now I’d best get the Bloomsbury Group done and dusted. The Stephens became the focus of a collection of like-minded individuals, most of whom had first met while attending Trinity College Cambridge. This is where Thoby, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf had all studied. They specialised, it seems, in art and sex. Nor was it all talk. As well as imbibing and propagating post-impressionist art, the members of the Bloomsbury Group were unabashed innovators in the field of relationships. Vanessa married art critic Clive Bell but had affairs with the artist and critic Roger Fand the painter Duncan Bell. Th bisexual Grant had several relationships with men, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, the novelist David Garnett and Lytton Strachey. Strachey was adored by Dora Carrington, although she married Ralph Partridge, who was an object of Strachey’s interest. Vanessa’s daughter Angelica thought her father was Clive bell but was told when she was 18 that it was Duncan grant. A few years later Angelica married David Garnett, who had been her true father’s lover two decades earlier. I can’t resist adding: so it has always been with toffs, for whom the normal rules did not then and do not now apply. I have very mixed feelings about the Bloomsbury Group. Undoubtedly a density of talent and a propensity for cultural, sexual and moral innovation; but a home too for snobbish arrogance and a vicious disdain for the less fortunate. Interestingly, I have taught often in that part of UCL that is 46 Gordon Square, once the home of the Stephens and, between 1916 and his death in 1946, of Keynes. There’s not much evidence of prior occupation now, but the views over the Square remain and an active imagination can fill in detail.
One way of broaching my long association with UCL is via mention of the Jeremy Bentham pub. Originally called the Duke of Wellington, the name was subsequently altered to celebrate Bentham, 1748-1832, who is frequently seen as a founder of UCL. Given that he was 78 at the time his role was doubtless more philosophical than practical. His contribution, whatever it amounted to, is preserved as an ‘auto-icon’ in a glass case in the South Cloisters of UCL (‘he’ apparently used to be wheeled into committee meetings to keep an eye on things). The foundation stone for UCL was laid on 30 April 1827, and it was from its opening in 1828, controversially to include students unable or unwilling to declare Anglican faith (the three principal benefactors were Catholic, Jewish and Noncomformist). UCL was mocked as ‘The Cockney College’, and the poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed wrote a spoof ‘Discourse’ delivered by a port-soaked Oxford college tutor to his peers in 1825 while the new university was under consideration:
‘Ye Dons and ye Doctors, ye Provosts and Proctors,
Who are paid to monopolise knowledge,
Come, make opposition, by vote and petition,
To the radical infidel college …
But let them not babble of Greek to the rabble
Nor teach the Mechanics their letters;
The labouring classes were born to be asses,
And not to be aping their betters.’
I got to know the warren which is the UCL campus quite well over the years, but I became especially familiar with one specific lecture theatre. This was the Darwin LT. The Darwin Building, which extends to Torrington Place, displaced the former home of Charles Darwin. Darwin lived in what is now 112 Gower Street, but was then 12 Upper Gower Street, between 1838 and 1842. In a letter of October, 1838, he wrote: ‘we are living a life of extreme quietness … we have given up all parties, for they agree with neither of us; and if one is quiet in London there is nothing like its quietness; there is grandeur about its smoky fogs and the dull distant sounds of cabs and coaches; in fact you may perceive I am becoming a thorough-paced cockney, and I glory in thoughts that I shall be here for the next six months.’ I taught medical students in the Darwin LT for many years, and as I’ve commented before I still miss my contact with these undergrads more so than postgrads, mainly because one could actually see (some of) their minds opening up to receive novel ideas. One memory: for fun, and hooked up to a roving microphone, I once walked up one side of the theatre, left the building to enter Gower Street, then re-entered the theatre to descend on its other side, lecturing the whole time. I got a round of applause. I was to wonder later if I might have crossed to Dillons/Waterstones whilst continuing to lecture, but I never tested this out.
To return momentarily to the Jeremy Bentham pub. It was here that I tended to meet students fresh from lectures or seminars, or more occasionally involved in various forms of political activism. Returning recently, I was appalled to find its innards ripped out and its transmutation into a wine bar, a symbolic act of the destructive end of an era. There is one other pub that I should comment on. This is the TCR on the Bloomsbury side of Tottenham Court Road. In my later years at UCL, and since, this became a favourite place to read and write. I even found its staff willing to dissuade other customers from occupying ‘my table’ by the plugs, and to pour my glasses of house white and tap water even as I entered the premises. It is difficult to over-estimate continuing salience of familiarity bonds!