From 1978 to 2006 I had my office(s) in Fitzrovia. Over that period I became familiar not only with its cafes, and those of Soho to its south, but with its bars. Initially I read and wrote in a few chosen haunts, for many years using biros and exercise books. When I was joined at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School by Paul Higgs I grew increasingly accustomed to coffee breaks, lunches and conversation, either in the canteen of the Middlesex HMS’s Windeyer Building, or along Mortimer Street, or more rarely along the more plush, posh and expensive Charlotte Street. Occasionally, alone or with Paul and colleagues, I visited local pubs; and Fitzrovia had and has a goodly collection.
Twenty-eight years in an area lend it a comfortable familiarity (and what I later called ‘familiarity bonds’ are important for health and wellbeing). There was a good deal of change to Fitzrovia during this period. Most conspicuously the Middlesex Hospital was raised to the ground and its Medical School absorbed into UCL’s in nearby Bloomsbury. It always was and it remains a moot point whether Bloomsbury is on the right or wrong side of Tottenham Court Road.
Cafes have come and gone in Fitzrovia apace: hardly any of those we frequented back in the day have survived (though Paul, Joanna Moncrieff and I still enjoy occasional coffees and catch-up chats in Pret a Manger, which is located on the ‘right’ side of Tottenham Court Road, just. It’s a different story with Fitzrovia’s pubs, most of which have sterner brick and cultural foundations. There are some of which I have particular memories.
The Green Man in Riding House Street was closest to our final base in the Wolfson Building (now gone) just up the road. It became a semi-regular 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 would sometimes adjourn to the Green Man for a pint or two. At the end of one term more alcohol than normal was consumed. After a while the barman approached us with a degree of uncertainty and diffidence. ‘Are you missing one of your party?’ We weren’t altogether 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 ubane and sophisticated student was gently awoken and escorted back to the group, and later was accompanied to Goodge Street tube and seen safely on her way home.
The second memory is preserved in my current home. Shortly before I departed Fitzrovia for Bloomsbury in 2006 I noticed that a series of evocative prints of bar scenes had disappeared from the walls of the Green Man. I made enquiries and was told that following a refurbishment 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 took them home in two goes. A couple now hang on our walls at home.
The One Tun was almost as accessible to us as the Green Man. It too became a familiar stop-off, so too for M.Sc students. It was a place too that we took speakers who contributed to our seminar programme. I recall Nick Rose downing a pint or two there. It was also the site of a theft when a colleague suddenly became aware that her bag had been stollen (I’d long since transferred my own wallet and mobile phone to my trouser pockets and ‘anchored’ any other possessions with a foot or table leg when drinking in inner London). She informed the landlord who exited from the One Tun at speed. He returned with some of the items from the 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 visitors. Dylan Thomas introduced himself to diarist, former art student and in 1943 a member of the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) Joan Wyndham in The Wheatsheaf with the proclamation: ‘I’m Dylan Thomas and I’m fucking skint. Be nice to me, Waafe, and buy me another Special Ale.’ He was not the only talented alcoholic to make The Wheatsheaf his regular abode. It was a first-choice watering hole for many an aspiring poet or literary figure during and after WW2.
My final selection from the several pubs for the discerning visitor to Fitzrovia 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 to say that Fitzrovia was the natural – thronging and ‘unsafe’ – venue for artists and literary figures in the 1930s, ‘40’s and beyond. George Orwell found it congenial, although if I remember correctly he, like many another, traipsed from Fitzrovia to Soho to escape the early closing of pubs (10.30pm as opposed to 11pm).
I could go on about the history of Fitzrovia but I won’t. Let me just hint at its enduring historical appeal. It was once the haunt of European communists and anarchists. Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky all spent time there in the first decade of the 20th 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 divison into the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, led by Lenin.
I could go on, not least by charting homes, scandals and infamous bohemian excess in Fitzroy Square itself. And there are many more pubs. Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne’s pub of choice in Fitzrovia is …