To be young – or youngish – in London is to have missed out on something. Missed out on what, nobody is quite clear. But wander through Soho at chucking-out time – some time after the watershed but before a nine-year-old’s bedtime – and the conversation will invariably drift towards the same place. Wasn’t there a time before this?
I’ve always felt the presence of this lost El Dorado somewhere in the back of my mind, surfacing when the pub I’m in calls last orders at half-past eight. But I’ve never been quite sure what I’m harking back to.
This was until I recently discovered an old clipping in the archives of the Sunday Times Magazine. The article is from 1978 and details a day in the life of Tom Baker: the man best known to the general public as one of the great Doctor Whos (or Doctors Who, like Attorneys-General), but also best known within the bounds of Soho as one of the greatest lizards who lounged.
The article seemed to capture a lost era of morning drinking and evening revelry, unimaginable to the modern eye. Baker himself turned 90 in January this year. It struck me that, instead of whingeing about a lost world I was born too late to encounter, I might be able to find that world by attempting to replicate this day in Baker’s life. Otherwise, at very least, my attempt to find his world might provide some explanation for how it was lost.
With some trepidation, then, and with a legal waiver signed accepting responsibility for whatever damage the mission might cause to my liver, I set out to replicate Baker’s day.
Baker wakes in a Soho room he does not recognise, and is ‘hit by terrible waves of anxiety. The feeling of loneliness that smacks of self-pity.’ This, at least, feels achievable. As he prepares to leave the house, he writes that ‘all you really need for confidence is always to have a toothbrush and a hundred or two in your pocket’. Later, I am told by an old acquaintance that Baker would carry the toothbrush visible in his breast pocket: an indicator to potential suitors that he was not intending to make it home.
First, he heads to Valerie’s on Old Compton Street for some coffee and to do the crossword. Valerie’s was a charming café run by a Belgian couple who moved to Soho in 1922. The wife, Esther, or Madame Valerie as she was known to punters, died some three years prior to the day we join the former Doctor.
Baker would never have known, but what happened next set in chain a series of events that would lead to a meteoric rise and catastrophic fall for what became the croissant giant Patisserie Valerie. After Madame Valerie’s death, Valerie’s was sold to new owners, then new owners again, expanding into a franchise. Eventually, some extremely dodgy accounting (read: alleged fraud) meant the whole empire crumbled. The administrators, KPMG, found a private equity firm to scoop up the remains. At this point, the metaphor for Soho feels regrettably heavy.
