Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
5
gallery. This former warehouse hosts three floors of exhibitions that change regularly
and are invariably worth a visit, as are the bookshop and café. There's also a
camera
obscura
on the third floor (Fri-Sun 11am-1pm).
Fitzrovia
Fitzrovia
is the very much quieter northern extension of Soho, beyond Oxford Street.
Like its neighbour, it has a ra
sh, cosmopolitan history, attracting its fair share of
writers and bohemians over the last hundred years or so, including the Pre-Raphaelites
and members of the Bloomsbury Group. That said, it's a lot less edgy than Soho, with
just two real sights to visit - an ornate Victorian church on Margaret Street and
Pollock's Toy Museum - and one unavoidable landmark, the former Post O
ce Tower.
All Saints, Margaret Street
Margaret St • Mon-Sat 7.30am-7pm, Sun 8am-7.30pm •
W
allsaintsmargaretstreet.org.uk •
!
Oxford Circus
Few London churches are as atmospheric as
All Saints, Margaret Street
, built by
William Butterfield in the 1850s. Patterned brickwork characterizes the entire
ensemble of clergy house, choir school (Laurence Olivier sang here as a boy) and
church, set around a small courtyard entered from the street through a pointed
arch. The church interior - one of London's gloomiest - is best visited on a sunny
afternoon when the light pours in through the west window, illuminating the
fantastic polychrome marble and stone which decorates the place from floor to
ceiling. Several of the walls are also adorned with Pre-Raphaelite Minton-tile
paintings, the east window is a neo-Byzantine quasi-iconostasis with saintly images
nestling in gilded niches, and the elaborate pulpit is like the entire church in
miniature. Surrounded by such iconographical clutter, you would be forgiven for
thinking you were in a Catholic church - but then that was the whole idea of the
Victorian High Church movement, which sought to re-Catholicize the Church of
England without actually returning it to the Roman fold.
Charlotte Street
Fitzrovia's main street,
Charlotte Street
is lined with lively cafés and restaurants, but its
real heyday was in the 1930s, when it was home to the
Tour Eiffel
, where Wyndham
Lewis and Ezra Pound launched the Vorticist magazine
Blast
.
L'Étoile
, further up, was
patronized by the likes of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot, while
Bertorelli's
was where
Eliot, John Berger and Christopher Isherwood used to meet at the Wednesday Club in
the 1950s. The same crowd would get plastered in the nearby
Fitzroy Tavern
- from
which the area got its sobriquet - along with rather more outrageous bohemians, like
the hard-drinking Nina Hamnett, the self-styled “Queen of Bohemia”, who used to
boast that Modigliani once told her she had the best tits in Europe.
Pollock's Toy Museum
1 Scala St • Mon-Sat 10am-5pm • £3 •
T
020 7636 3452,
W
pollockstoymuseum.com •
!
Goodge Street
Housed above a wonderful toy shop in the backstreets of Fitzrovia is the highly
atmospheric, doll's-house-like
Pollock's Toy Museum
. Its collections include a fine
example of the Victorian paper theatres popularized by Benjamin Pollock, who sold
them under the slogan “a penny plain, two pence coloured”. The other exhibits range
from vintage teddy bears to Sooty and Sweep, and from Red Army soldiers to wax
dolls, filling every nook and cranny of the museum's six tiny, rickety rooms and the
stairs - be sure to look out for the dalmatian, Dismal Desmond.
Post O
ce Tower
Exploring Fitzrovia, it's impossible to ignore the looming presence of the former
Post
O
ce Tower
(o
cially known as the BT Tower), a glass-clad pylon on Cleveland Street,
