In Earl’s Court – an area lacking in gastropubs – a conversion of the former Coleherne public house, which attracts a good following in spite of offering food that tends to incidental.
Earl’s Court – birthplace, as it happens, of Harden’s – is not the place it was. Much colour used to be provided by the area’s gay community (to which you could just about have applied the epithet ’embattled’ in those far off days).
In particular, there was a public house called the Coleherne, outside which leather-clad gentlemen would gather on sunny days. Perhaps it was because this crowd was so conspicuous that the hostelry became celebrated in London as ‘the most famous gay pub in the world’. (The title of ‘most famous gay bar in the world’ was, of course, already taken – it was a riot around Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, in 1969, that kicked off the whole modern gay liberation movement.)
We record all this history, because it is in the process of a Stalinist effacement by the new proprietors of the site. Even the famous name has been swept away. These classic Victorian boozer premises now have a nice, inoffensive name, and an Identikit loud-wallpaper-and-chandeliers look to go with it.
And what a success it seems to be! Perhaps because there aren’t really any places within half a mile with gastropub pretensions, the new-look premises are absolutely mobbed, especially in the early evening.
If that sounds like rather grudging approbation, it is. We thought the food was thoroughly undistinguished – to the extent that we can now barely recall what we ate.
But there are compensations. Prices are not demanding. Service is very friendly. And there’s a bubbly atmosphere, sustained by a crowd that’s notably mixed by nationality, age and gender. All that’s missing, sadly, is the men in leather.
