Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and ends, as these, of course, are purely artificial; I mean the genuine ones where people
of a like turn of mind tend to gravitate, much in the way that the eighteenth-century coffee
houses tended to attract clients with interests in common. There is the Coach and Eight in
Upper Richmond Road, by Putney Bridge, for instance - full of Spy cartoons, old maps,
prints, and rowing relics, as far as I know London's only rowing pub. There are legal pubs
- the one now called the Magpie and Stump behind the Law Courts is an example, and
there are others on the fringes of the Inner and Middle Temples. In Dean Street, Soho,
the Frenchmen congregate at the York Minster, and there is the wonderfully named Essex
Serpent for Covent Garden, the Opera Tavern (both these have fine florid Victorian exter-
iors) for those 'of Drury Lane' and another splendidly named pub, the Steam Packet, for
the men of Billingsgate. City hostelries for City gents are many, including historical ones
like the George and Vulture, Mr Pickwick's refuge, and the Jamaica Wine House. There
are intellectuals' pubs in Hampstead, where advanced thinkers constellate, artists' pubs in
Chelsea, some lined with paintings for sale, pubs for journalists, of course, and wine bars,
including the wonderfully period interior of El Vino's in Fleet Street (iron tables, lincrusta
wallpaper, and a magnificent period telephone, all quite unspoiled), pubs for cricket en-
thusiasts, homosexuals' pubs, even, where queers meet queers, and one patronised by les-
bians.
London pubs are rich in all the trappings of the Victorian age, which knew exactly how
a town pub should appear. A fine one is illustrated here - the King and Queen in the Har-
row Road. This is nineteenth-century Baroque at its most florid. Grey marble columns rise
from a mosaic floor, raised a step above the pavement. There is splendid ironwork - iron
letters and wrought iron - over the door. The words 'Saloon Bar' have a bucolic abandon,
showing the influence of art nouveau . (I have included in this chapter the best art nouveau
pub in London - the Black Friar, near The Times office.) These highly ornamented pubs
of the 1860-90 period show great skill in stone cutting and wood carving. For those who
take pleasure in the intersection of planes, there is much to admire in the way variously in-
tricate surfaces, diverse mouldings, and arabesques run into and fuse with each other. Such
architecture is the antithesis of modern movements. The architects of the late Victorian
pubs and music-halls knew exactly what the situation demanded - extravagance, exuber-
ance, and plenty of decoration for its own sake. Fortunately, there is no theory of design
behind such buildings: the architects helped themselves to what they wanted like Kipling's
Homer. The result is exactly right. The King and Queen has much mahogany and engraved
and embossed glass. These in combination are basic to the Victorian pub. So, too, are the
highly polished mirrors, deeply bevelled, that are the support for highly wrought paintings.
These belong to the 1880s usually, the subjects generally being of bulrushes over which
swallows are on the wing, perhaps with kingfishers or other birds of the wayside stream or
country brook, corn, barley, and the like. Such designs are also carried out in painted glass
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