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  The maitre d’ returned with his emergency tie collection, one I shouldn’t have been surprised to see characterised by prodigious breadth and an unabashed boldness of design. I selected one that only vaguely resembled a child’s hand-drawn copy of a Magic Eye image; he smiled gently, then lowered his gaze in compassion. ‘And for the, ah, jacket?’

  As he led me cravenly off to the cloakroom I tried not to think that I might actually be paying – paying through the bloodied and broken nose – for this indignity. This was a thought that crystallised as I trudged head down back across the foyer in the attendant’s jacket selection, a gold-buttoned, soup-cuffed blazer presumably abandoned in some West End gutter by Sir Les Patterson after an especially clumsy night out.

  I shuffled silently into the Grill Room, in no fit state to appreciate that the low-ceilinged velvety chromeness made this comfortably the most thirties ambience I had yet experienced. A waiter settled me behind many items of geometrically aligned crockery, unable to avoid tilting his incredulous leer towards my outfit at an angle that made me feel like an improbably bosomed barmaid at last orders.

  When he returned to take my order figures had been wobbling up from the menu as if out of a heat haze: monkfish ragout £28.50, haddock Monte Carlo £27, veal steak with salsify £26.50. ‘I think I might have something light . . . maybe . . . maybe just the Welsh rarebit?’ What was I doing here, dressed up like a Rotarian tramp in a place where cheese on toast was nine quid, and where that was a bargain?

  ‘Just the Welsh rarebit,’ he repeated, endeavouring to bully his features into an approximation of servility but instead looking as if low but increasing voltage was being applied to the soles of his feet. ‘Shall I call the sommelier?’

  A bray of unsteady laughter burst out to my left; I turned and saw two red-toothed priests gesticulating at each other over a table of half-filled glasses. What was the point? Why order Welsh rarebit from a kitchen whose quest for gastronomic novelty inspired so many notable creations, including two – one of peach, one of toast – that bear the name of Edwardian Savoy regular Dame Nellie Melba?

  ‘This is the American Bar, isn’t it?’ I asked, hardly bothering to sound genuinely confused or surprised.

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ replied the waiter in an identical tone. And so five minutes later, relieved of the sartorial accessories not deemed obligatory for those merely intending to get pissed at the Savoy, I was propping up the American Bar – a venue whose already pleasing period ambience seemed substantially more pleasing by the time I’d sucked down the dregs of a Long Island Iced Tea, not so much a cocktail as a minibar in a glass. Mind-messing entertainment for the price of a Welsh rarebit.

  The Strand, I pondered, had rather lost its way since the thirties; these days it was more of a bypass than a promenade, a through way to the West End proper, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. But then having been encouraged out through the foyer doors by busy, starch-cuffed hands, it occurred to me that promenading was a dead art. As I reeled light-headedly up Savoy Court I wondered if I might possibly be the first Londoner since Burlington Bertie to have walked up the Strand and down again just for the sake of walking, right across the city’s heart from the tip of SW1 to the toe of EC4.

  The doorway dossers I’d passed on the way up had now been supplemented by half a dozen others, and stooping into the scaffolded pavement passage I almost tripped up a crusty on crutches appraising a discarded Prêt à Manger sandwich. Peter Ackroyd called the street ‘a great thoroughfare of the dispossessed’, and though everyone else around might have been passing through, the Strand’s vagrants were clearly going nowhere. When, for the fifth time in half as many minutes I was mumblingly hassled for change, I found myself doing something very unusual. Maybe it was the cocktail, or maybe it was where I’d drunk it, but anyway there I was, squatting down next to a sallow, expressionless youth with the sort of matted dreadlocks that suggested he’d only just learned to request money after years of begging passers-by to smear their chewing gum in his hair. ‘This might sound a bit odd,’ I said, trying not to let him smell my breath or me his, ‘but if you roll these dice I’ll give you a quid.’

  The tiny change in his expression suggested amused relief – of the many novel transactions proposed to him I imagined this was amongst the least unsavoury. He tilted out a minute shrug and held forth a surprisingly pink palm into which I dropped the dice. A wrist rotated, fingers opened and out clicked a six and a three. ‘Cheers,’ I said, but preparing to pick up the dice I did the maths: the six would take me from Trafalgar Square to Go To Jail, and the three on to Community Chest.

  Blurting an apology, I rooted through the backpack for the cards that since my experience in the Ritz I now took everywhere. I elbowed an ankle and a pedestrian tutted sourly; as I scrabbled out the top pink card my ears were already a matching shade. ‘Advance to GO,’ I read aloud, before addressing my guest roller again. ‘Look – make it two rolls for two quid.’

  He almost smiled this time as the dice were picked up and dropped once more, revealing a six that I deduced took me to The Angel. ‘Should be two hundred quid,’ he said in a disarmingly soft milkmaid burr. ‘You went past GO.’

  I allowed myself a horribly patronising laugh as I gathered up dice and cards and got to my feet. ‘Should be,’ I drawled pompously, reaching into my pocket, ‘but I’m afraid it’s just the two.’

  Only as my fingers scrabbled forlornly for things that jingled did I remember my parking meter’s serious change habit. My red ears blanching and that R. White’s smile sidling tentatively across my face once more I held out a hand with three coins in it, one of them tiny and silver, none of them gold. And moments later I was jogging past Charing Cross with pungent West Country epithets ringing reedily out behind me.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Light Blues

  OF ALL THE London board’s idiosyncrasies, none is more roundly ludicrous than The Angel, Islington. It’s a pub, not a street, and it’s not even in Islington. At least it wasn’t when Vic and Marge stopped there for lunch, having walked up Pentonville Road from King’s Cross: in 1823 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported that the Islington parish had refused to bury a dead beggar found in the street outside the Angel, allowing the parish of Clerkenwell, whose boundary ran just the other side of the pub, to annex it after having undertaken the responsibility themselves. In the thirties Clerkenwell was part of Finsbury, which was amalgamated into the borough of Islington only in 1965. So you see, it should have been The Angel, Finsbury.

  In the early seventeenth century an inn with the spread-winged Angel of the Annunciation as its sign was the first staging post out of London on the Great North Road, and when in 1756 the New Road – London’s first bypass, you’ll recall – was opened, cross-town commuters joined inter-city travellers at its bars. Business boomed when London’s first bus was routed past the tavern doors in 1829, and again in 1862 when the Agricultural Hall opened up the road. Rebuilt with the lofty dome that remains a landmark, by 1899 the Angel was serving eight hundred lunches a day, the sort of figure to attract the Lyons Corner House site-seekers, who duly snapped it up in 1922.

  The Lyons Corner House dominated thirties London in a far more ubiquitous and all-pervading sense than McDonald’s or Starbucks have managed or ever will. They were institutions: almost every street on the Monopoly board had one, and some – Piccadilly, the Strand, Oxford Street – boasted half a dozen or more; by 1939 the chain was operating 260 premises. Many were enormous – if the aforementioned Coventry Street outlet’s capacity of 4,500 didn’t impress you, perhaps the 1,000 staff employed at the Marble Arch Corner House will – and often palatial. An American visitor was astounded to find what was by rights just a big cafeteria ‘decorated after the fashion of a palace ballroom, with immense chandeliers of prismed glass and a balcony furnished in cream and gold’.

  The chain employed top architects and designers: Oliver Bernard, creator of that V&A-exhibited Strand Palace doorway, was
also responsible for many Corner House interiors. And yet they were truly democratic: Orwell’s destitute Gordon Comstock, walking past a Corner House, was met by ‘a wave of hot, cake-scented air’ and fondly mused that ‘you could sit there for nearly an hour. A cup of tea twopence, two buns a penny each.’ Nonetheless it was more than good enough for a company director like Victor Watson, and when, on New Year’s Eve 1966, George Harrison was refused entry at a poncy nightclub for not wearing a tie, off he went with Eric Clapton to celebrate at the all-welcoming Coventry Street Corner House.

  Opened on Piccadilly in 1894 by a firm that had until then operated a chain of tobacconists, the first Lyons Tea Shop represented a social revolution. The Underground had made it possible to travel quickly and cheaply into town, and for the first time middle-class, suburban women began to congregate in the West End from all over London with the idea of spending an afternoon window-shopping along Monopoly’s green streets.

  But alas! Lunchtime arrives, and madam’s options are limited to an expensive and exclusive restaurant whose maitre d’ will very probably turn away anyone he doesn’t personally recognise, or a pub, where she will knock over a brimming spittoon with her bustle while trying to ward off a drunk encyclopaedia salesman.

  Or consider this: madam sagely stuffs her face at home prior to hopping on the Tube, but then, horror of horrors, finds those cups of tea demanding to be let out as she’s peeping at the Heinz tins in Fortnum’s window. Only recently had London’s first female public convenience opened in Camden, and it was still being deliberately run into by cabbies expressing the general outrage at such a concept. In short, when a downtown woman had to go, she had to go to a Lyons.

  The Lyons Tea Shops changed middle-class women’s lives, as later the larger, cheaper Corner Houses did for the working class. As well as being clean and congenial, they were increasingly grand. People who couldn’t entertain at home could buy their friends tea at a Corner House done up like a stately home, and be served like the nobs by a maid in a pinafore (Lyons trademarked their waitresses’ nickname, the Nippy, in 1924). The Corner Houses catered for a tea-time culture that Londoners of all classes subscribed to: that famous name out the front, in gold letters on a white background, was a guarantee of value and quality. Soon there were salon orchestras in the larger outlets, and a Corner House became one of the few venues considered respectable for a meeting between young couples, inevitably before going on to the pictures.

  The firm was an eager innovator. Lyons’ central kitchen at Hammersmith was a mass-catering production line, pre-preparing cakes and sandwiches and delivering them by van to branches all over London. The Corner House at Throgmorton Street was the world’s first underground restaurant, serving Viennese whirls and poached eggs 40 feet below the Bank of England. Most of the West End branches were several restaurants in one: an Egg and Bacon Bar serving all-day breakfasts; a sandwich counter; other departments specialising in cakes or cooked meats. To keep control of the stupendous throughput of staff, customers and buttered scones, the firm was one of the first in Britain to acquire a computer: unable, in 1949, to find any such machine to buy, the Lyons R&D boys sat down and built one themselves, based on a pioneering Cambridge mainframe. I still can’t quite get over that.

  And yet despite all this, you will be aware from the current absence of Lyons Corner Houses on the nation’s high streets that it all went wrong. By the fifties London’s youth wanted something a little less prim, a little more boisterous: an espresso bar, perhaps, even if it meant having to listen to Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard. When they went out on a date there were now more romantic options – cosy French bistros or an Italian trattoria – and when they got married they could stay in and watch telly. Lyons saw which way the wind was blowing, or thought it did, and in 1954 introduced the first Wimpy Bars in its West End Corner Houses.

  Well, we all know how that turned out. Still clinging to the waitress service and that mindset of genteel Edwardian decorum which had served the firm so stalwartly, every Wimpy burger was delivered to your table by a Nippy along with the knife and fork with which you were to effect its consumption. Unaware that they were rather missing the point of the fast-food revolution, Lyons blindly proceeded to convert many of their outlets into Wimpy Bars. If the name itself, borrowed from a minor Popeye character, was unfortunate – wimp meant then what it means now – then the menu was even more tragically deluded.

  Take a broad, waxen frankfurter, hew notches all the way up one side and drop it into a deep-fat frier. When charred to an approximation of lightly napalmed flesh withdraw, bend into a tight coil, sling in some onions and stuff and wedge between two halves of a bloated teacake. Note that many of your customers are now leaving, their faces pale and tight; but note too the small group of novelty-hungry schoolboys who remain. They are eager to sample your outré creation, it seems; all that remains is to give it a name. You lift the breaded covering and gaze at the broiled, coiled sausage for inspiration: Frankentwister, you think, or maybe Whirlyburger. Loopolata? But suddenly it comes to you, and nodding in happy self-congratulation you walk up to your youthful clientele, theatrically clear your throat and holding forth Wimpy’s new flagship offering grandly announce: ‘Gentlemen, I give you the Big Bender.’

  And what of Wimpy’s Brown Derby, a doughnut confection evidently picked up on a shovel, still steaming, from behind a racehorse? I don’t think I’ve ever read through a Wimpy menu with a straight face or a still stomach.

  Of all the London institutions that messed up after the war – the Underground, C&A, homburg manufacturers – none had more to mess up than Lyons. Yet mess it up they did, promptly and utterly. London’s last Corner Houses closed in the seventies, and most of the Wimpy Bars were sold off in 1989, reopening soon after as Burger Kings. Along with McDonald’s, these did for families what the Corner Houses had done for women: allowed them the freedom and independence to have a day out in town without being tutted at. Yet somehow 303 Wimpy Bars survive around the country, patronised by a doubly doomed clientele of smoking pensioners, 303 waitress-served restaurants where the Benders are forever Big, the Derbies forever Brown.

  The Angel Corner House, though, was one of the first to go. It served its last scone in 1959 and after a brief period as a student hostel lay empty for decades until converted into what I saw, standing by a polished black-granite pillar at the foot of the façade’s netted scaffolding, to be a branch of the Co-Operative Bank.

  Wouldn’t it be splendid, I thought, leaning back towards the bad-tempered lunchtime traffic as I tried to trace the meshed silhouette of that famous lofty dome, if someone resurrected and updated the Corner House concept: family-friendly catering for all in grandly regal surroundings. Later I would conclude that labour costs (most of those 1,000 staff at Marble Arch were paid far less than the equivalent of today’s minimum wage) and the unfeasibility of luring 4,500 punters into a single restaurant made this unlikely, but at the time I had other concerns – mostly related to the builder’s transistor radio which, choosing that moment to work its way through some high-up hole in the scaffold netting, met a traumatic and noisy death perhaps 7 inches in front of me.

  Pentonville Road was right there, heading west just past those shards of black plastic and pirouetting Duracells, but instead I walked back north along Upper Street’s raised pavements past a staggering succession of coffee shops and cute eateries: eighty-six in all, I learned later, and almost all with outside tables even this late in October. Add in the antique market and a token ethnic veneer – an Indian bedspread shop, a Bengali in a Nehru hat selling peacock feathers outside the Tube – and you have the apotheosis of right-on yuppiedom. The sun came out and within moments everyone around me had whipped on a pair of those bug-eyed sunglasses so de rigueur amongst off-duty racing drivers.

  This part of Islington, gentrified so ruthlessly in the last twenty years, seems ill at ease in the light blues: in the real world, each of those little fifty-quid houses you line up on The Angel wou
ld, according to local estate agents, have set you back £600,000. Perhaps aggrieved that he’d paid nearer the latter figure than the former, a couple of years back a spokesman for the Angel Neighbourhood Forum, inevitably christened Jamie, appealed to Waddingtons to promote The Angel, Islington, up from the cheap end of the board. ‘It’s very misleading,’ he blethered, no doubt in a shrill yet braying yah. ‘People feel it’s somewhat derogatory of the area. I mean, places like Whitechapel Road do remain a little questionable.’

  Pat Haynes laughed like a drain when I’d told him about that on the phone. A self-described ‘local geezer’ for almost sixty years, Pat is Islington’s longest-serving councillor and a man better placed than most to offer an overview of the set’s upheavals; to sing me the blues. Pentonville Road and The Angel – or at least its immediate environs – were the first places on the board I’d visited where people didn’t just work or play, but still actually lived. There was a human side to their story which needed a human insight.

  Radicalism has been part of Islington’s make-up since Tom Paine drew up his Rights of Man while lodging at the Angel. In 1990 Islingtonians played a prominent role in the poll tax revolt, and in 1995 protestors forcibly excluded traffic from what remains one of London’s most polluted areas. For years you couldn’t walk out of Angel Tube station without being harangued by Socialist Worker vendors in elaborately knackered donkey jackets. Walking in through Islington Town Hall’s doors – above which the red flag has been hoisted on more than one occasion over the years – it was easy to imagine being intimately examined for telltale signs of imperialist decadence by a humourless conscript in the Haynesian People’s Army.