Do Not Pass Go

by Tim Moore

  In 1760 George III had been proclaimed king in Leicester Square; just over one hundred years later the now headless statue of his great-grandfather was flogged there for £16 scrap. Leicester Square’s decline was complete. The only way was up, or at least across. Music halls moved in, the Alhambra occupying the Aladdinesque Panopticon building and the Empire setting up shop in the similarly shortlived Royal London Panorama. Leicester Square had found its level, and quickly proved adept at giving its public what it wanted. By 1936 both Alhambra and Empire were showcases of the new breed of super cinema, and between them the square was thoughtfully punctuated with all-night restaurants such as the Quality Inn with its clean, nautical Art Deco interiors and the self-service Honeydew, offering ‘Canadian Pie in containers to take away’.

  With a long-standing reputation as the starting point for many a lad’s night out – a reputation name-checked in the chorus of ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’ – Leicester Square was clearly a good place to hang about in if you wanted to know what the man in the street got up to when he fancied an evening as a man about town, and one night in May 1937 there were a lot of people with notebooks wandering about it doing just that. The Mass Observation movement was a bold attempt to take a snapshot of everyday British life: social science was in its infancy in the thirties, and there was a general sense of urgency (general at least among earnest middle-class lefties) to take this snapshot before rapidly evolving patterns of work and leisure blurred it beyond recognition. On Coronation Day – 12 May 1937 – hundreds of Mass Observation volunteers insinuated themselves into crowds around the country, scribbling down incidents witnessed and conversations overheard in pubs and on buses, watching how people walked and behaved. No one is sure what the operation achieved – it must have been terrible for the organisers to see their worthy venture mutate into the clipboard-clasping horror that is market research – but if you’re trying to get an impression of London life in the thirties, there is no more entertaining or evocative source book. Where else would you discover that every time the lights went out on a thirties Tube train underground someone would start making ‘animal noises’? Or that a common pastime of the age was to shout ‘Beaver!’ at men with beards?

  So it’s 11 p.m. on 12 May 1937, and you’re at Leicester Square Tube. Mind out: ‘As we go up the escalator we are amused to see a young man, hugging a soda-water siphon, come sliding down the belt of the banister; as he comes in contact with a lamp-stand on the slide the bottle is broken, and he sails on his way merrily, too drunk to mind anything.’ Outside you see a crowd dancing arm in arm and singing ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’; you discreetly ease open your notebook and write ‘They appear to be working people.’ You cross into the square, where a man with ‘brown uneven hair, blue coat and bowler worn at an angle’ is operating a three-card trick: ‘he asks you to select the queen, turns the cards over and when you draw the queen it is an eight. He sells the trick to a young boy who shows you how easy it is . . . later he gives the boy a cigarette. At next pitch, man is chaining partner prior to release act . . . as he takes the collection he says he is a white man (this with much feeling) and points to Union Jack above. He says it covers four corners of the universe and it does not matter if you are yellow or white or black, if you are British you are a sportsman and expect a fair wage for your work . . .’

  It starts raining; you take cover in a pub doorway. ‘On way out push against somebody, say “Sorry” and hear “That’s all right, dearie, don’t be in such a hurry.” Look round and in spite of lack of make-up and neat well-cut coat, realise I am being quite nicely accosted by a prostitute, quiet-voiced, good accent, etc. Ask why she’s out so late – or so early? – and she says business is not so good as it might be. Before she can decide whether I’m a potential client, I cut across the road and into Underground station.’

  Feeling an impulsive burst of empathy for those men with notebooks, and trying not to think too much about that dearie business, I’d been seized with inspiration. Looking at the board, and then at the map, Vic and Marge’s yellow-set game plan had suddenly seemed obvious. A movie in Leicester Square, a cocktail in the Café de Paris on Coventry Street, and to round off a romantic evening, what better than a . . . well, a night at the Ritz down the end of Piccadilly. It was an inviting schedule, and one that with a bit of planning I could replicate faithfully. As faithfully, anyway, as Victor probably managed to. A night at the Ritz, I soon discovered, starts at £305. Bed was out; I’d settle for breakfast. The restaurant opened at 7 and I’d arranged to meet my friend Ian there on the dot. I was going to do Leicester Square, Conventry Street and Piccadilly in a single through-the-night burst. I was going out to paint the yellows red.

  Throughout my suburban upbringing I’d only rarely been Up West past midnight, and never until the small hours were starting to get big again. Excited by my belated debut as a twenty-four-hour party person, I was also inevitably trepidatious. The incompatibility of the three venues presented a sartorial dilemma: I would have to hang about Leicester Square, presumably in the company of noisily tanked-up students, before being granted entrance to a club that sounded as if it might not let me in without a top hat. And the schedule was, by my standards at least, wildly ambitious: these days I only stay up all night for general elections, and as a father of three, access to the powdered stimulants most often associated with nocturnal stamina was not as straightforward as it might have once been.

  Compromises, in short, were inevitable, but slipping a pack of guarana chewing gum into the pocket of my black velvet trousers I hoped I’d made the right call. As night began to fall, though, so did a steady drizzle, and, gathering my family together by the front door, that potentially voguish ensemble was set off with an old raincoat stuffed full of possibly relevant bits of paper. ‘I’m going out now,’ I announced bravely, ‘and I’m not coming back until tomorrow.’ (I wish I’d remembered this ten minutes later when I bought that day return.)

  Extended to distant new suburbs west and north in 1933, the Piccadilly line is probably the most thirties of all. And because London is the way it is, through a combination of sloth, economy and nostalgia much of that period ambience lingers on. The bench upon which I planted my lustrously trousered fundament at Hammersmith station bore the patina of seventy years, and the next stop down, Barons Court, was protected from the October elements by a rural-branch-line platform canopy with those scallopy wooden overhangs. Half the ‘next train’ indicators at this end of the line look like they’ve been torn off the front of a bus with wooden wheels.

  My carriage was the standard refurbished seventies job, but as recently as 1988 the Piccadilly was still running scarlet thirties units with maple-wood floors and woollen moquette seating that together with the soft downlighting and underfoot carpet of fag ends imbued my journeys to school with the louche ambience of a slightly seedy cocktail bar at closing time. At least our Tube trains still have proper sprung and upholstered seating, unlike the buttock-bullying plastic benches favoured by most other European mass-transit operators. That’s got to be up in the top one hundred reasons to live in London, probably somewhere in the mid-seventies between Andy’s Kebabs on Turnham Green and the view of Battersea Power Station at dusk.

  Just before we dived underground, I looked up at a mansion block and noticed the ceilings of the apartments within flickering with the reason why the train was almost empty at 7 p.m., and why those super cinemas aren’t so super any more. Televisions first appeared in London’s shops the same year as Monopoly, under slogans that read ‘Hear – and see! Complete darkness IS NOT NECESSARY’. And though in fact complete darkness was all you’d have been able to watch a lot of the time – the BBC inaugurated the world’s first programme schedule in 1936, but even twenty years later was putting out only four hours of telly a day – the writing was on the screen. Once video had killed the radio star, he got stuck into the cinema, the art of urban promenading and – yes – even board games.

  Interestingly, howe
ver, no one seemed to have passed this on to Leicester Square. On an unpromisingly moist-aired Thursday in October, the only pedestrianised street on the Monopoly board was jammed with human traffic, a burger-breathed, busker-bellowing melee which could only be traversed via extensive weaving and excuse-mes. Hopping neatly over a puddle of beery vomit, I began to realise that most of the entertainment was very much of the old school. The teenagers around, nearly all of them Asian, were at least one sheet to the wind, with a vocal minority who’d certainly have known what to do if you’d handed them a soda siphon at the top of an escalator. Two million E tables are necked every week in Britain, and the only way the brewers have been able to lure back the youth market has been by working up new variations on the oldest drug: viz., alcopops. And with London’s pubs charging up to £3.10 a pint, landlords in earnest pursuit of the young pound have been obliged to appeal to what the industry calls ‘volume drinkers’ (10 per cent of us – I’m taking you with me – are responsible for 60 per cent of the nation’s total alcohol intake) by slashing prices. West End happy hours now run all evening, often in bars where the music is so loud that the only point of opening your mouth is to pour a Bacardi Breezer into it (or several out of it).

  A silent Donald Pleasence in a funeral suit came up and pressed a leaflet into my hand; I looked at its cover and read: ‘This world is heading for a terrible day.’ Leicester Square was still clearly seen as a playground for souls who needed saving, but I’d so much rather have been invited to the more wonderful days detailed on the nightclub flyers being pressed upon everyone else. With a start I realised Donald had singled me out for redemption because, like him and unlike anyone in a generous radius who didn’t have numbers on their epaulettes, I was over the age of nineteen, alone and sober.

  And in fact wearing a tie, which had seemed a prerequisite for the Café de Paris and the Ritz, but in being liberally decorated with Magic Roundabout flowers and teamed with those black velvet trousers was now achieving the precise opposite of the intended social camouflage. A phalanx of bare-midriffed girls nudged each other and made loud bursting sounds as they passed, and I suddenly recalled my French O level exam, and the picture story which ended with a boy in a flamboyantly cut three-piece suit wilting in humiliation before a dance floor of jeering cap-sleeved peers. Absently folding a £1 pizza slice into my mouth outside the Odeon, a huge gobbet of oiled matter slopped straight from chin to tie; as a tribute to the reckless stridency of design it looked comfortably at home.

  I’d chosen the Odeon partly because it’s one of the last London cinemas not to have been chopped and sliced into a dozen mini screens which make watching a big new release like going to your mate’s house to watch the football – the main screen capacity is 1,612 and there’s still a price difference between stalls and royal circle – and partly because in an earlier life it had been the Alhambra. It’s almost impossible to overstate the cinema’s dominance of London’s social life in the thirties: over half of all Londoners went once a week and over a quarter twice or more. There were 4,967 cinemas in the country, and in 1937 London’s studios turned out two hundred films.

  Even more dislocated than is usual after watching huge things happen in a big dark room – by opting for Moulin Rouge, the leg I’d tried to plant in 1936 had just been yanked back another forty years – I blinked out into a jarring brashness that at 11 o’clock was noticeably diminished. Very drunk girls stared grimly ahead as they ploughed towards the Underground with the off-balance determination of a sailor crossing the deck of a storm-tossed ship; boys in T-shirts tried slightly too hard to pretend they weren’t cold as they followed. Most people’s evenings were coming to an end whereas mine – consult watch, stifle sigh, feel age – was just beginning. ‘You wanna show some fucking RESPECT!’ shrieked a female voice close behind, and though everyone else around summoned a derisive chorus of ‘Ooooooooooh!’ I couldn’t restrain a reflex squeak of distress. If I couldn’t handle a lairy schoolgirl at 11 p.m., what hope for the considerably more colourful characters I was certain to encounter in the eight hours ahead?

  The beep-beep of reversing dustcarts announced that the binmen were coming on duty just as the entertainers were clocking off, a black dwarf packing up her unicycle and one of those bronze-robot types shuffling towards the Tube station and what at this hour would certainly be an especially stimulating journey home. Nothing substantial had changed in sixty-four years: I didn’t see an escapologist, but on another night I might have; and though the three-card tricksters have been cleared off the streets in recent years there were a couple of guys running the old ‘funny bike’ scam.

  As a late-night spectator sport, only an extended on-foot police pursuit runs this close. First a bloke – usually, as here, a native of the Turko-Balkan regions who hasn’t spent quite enough time in north-western Europe to decode the correlation between moustache-bulk and homosexuality – scratches two chalk lines 8 feet apart on the pavement before riding a small and slightly odd-looking bicycle between them, shouting as he does so that if anyone give him one pound and do this, he give them ten pound cash money. Then a lot of men – drunk men – queue up, pay up, saddle up and fall over. The equation I’d begun to dread was rewardingly inverted: I was having a good time, and other people were getting hurt.

  Working people still lived around Leicester Square in the thirties – there was a big grammar school on the south-eastern corner – and, even more arrestingly, they actually worked here too. Thurston’s at No. 45 knocked up billiard tables, there was a beer bottler’s at No. 36 and smaller enterprises around the square turned out umbrellas, choclates and musical instruments. Feeling another pang of melancholy that here, as everywhere in central London, all such romantic manufacturing endeavours had been shoved aside by the bronzed-glass, security-desked likes of The Communications Building, I walked past an All Bar One and glumly beheld staff bringing out the binliners and switching the lights off. It wasn’t even half-eleven. Despite the grumblings of Westminster Council, Leicester Square just isn’t the twenty-four-hour party it was in the thirties, when the snack bars and restaurants started serving breakfast at midnight.

  People could feast their eyes and stuff their faces in Leicester Square, but if you found yourself a few gins short of an escalator luge challenge and it was gone 10.30, then the only place to get them down your neck was one space along. It might not mean much to anyone now, but then more than any other street on the board the inclusion of Coventry Street is a reflection of the Monopoly era.

  Knocked up ten years after Leicester Square and named in honour of Charles II’s Secretary of State (first name Henry), Coventry Street wasted even less time than its quadrilateral neighbour in sacrificing prestige for profit. Gambling clubs appeared immediately, soon followed by the sort of restaurants and theatres that would later have Victorians huffing that ‘the bad character of the place is at least two centuries old’.

  Claustrophobically sandwiched between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, Coventry Street seemed incapable of resisting the West End status quo, but somehow, in the twenties, it managed to make a name for itself as the venue for a slightly higher class night out, one that would stand it in good stead when Vic and Marge promoted it above Leicester Square in the yellow-set hierarchy.

  Even the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street stood a cut above its ubiquitous brethren: opened in 1907 it was the size of a department store, boasting acres of gilt and marble and a stupendous and still globally unrivalled dining capacity of 4,500 – not so much the chain’s flagship as its aircraft carrier. Scott’s restaurant next door could claim a pan-European reputation for its fish dishes (despite sharing premises, as I noted from a contemporary photo, with the intriguing Universities Toilet Club), and the Prince of Wales Theatre opposite resisted the pressure to dumb down by becoming a cinema (it was at the Royal Variety Performance there in 1963 that John Lennon trotted out his jewellery-rattling putdown).

  But Coventry Street’s reputation was founded, almo
st exclusively, on what one contemporary commentator called ‘a determination to drink out of hours’. Draconian licensing laws imposed during the First World War to stop munitions workers sidling off to the pub were still ruthlessly enforced (as in fact they largely are today, most particularly in terms of 11 o’clock closing), and those stricken with unslakeable nocturnal thirsts were forced to patronise obscure venues that through some arcane loophole were exempt from the legislation – they formed railway clubs and got drunk on trains, or drama clubs and got drunk in theatres.

  Although there was no shortage of pubs, a certain sort of Londoner wouldn’t be seen dead going into one, or rather would be if he tried to. Pubs were for working men, with spittoons and sawdust, and remained fiercely territorial: it was common to ask a man not where he lived but which pub he drank at. Strangers, particularly of the hoity-toity sort, were not welcome. Besides, many pubs didn’t serve anything but beer – the landlords couldn’t afford the more expensive spirits licence – and toffs simply wouldn’t consider what even one of George Orwell’s more sympathetic upper-class creations called ‘filthy common ale’. (Having said that, as the decade wore on it became fashionable amongst the elite to affect an ironic enthusiasm for working-class culture: in 1937, a record year for dartboard sales, our old Queen Mum was photographed on the oche alongside her husband, and the year after the Duke and Duchess of Kent were seen doing the Lambeth Walk, oi.)