Before he got started in the death business, London’s grooviest undertaker was one of our most enterprising restaurateurs. In the 90s and noughties, as the owner of Coast, Mash and most famously the Atlantic Bar & Grill, he was caterer-in-chief to the Cool Britannia crowd. Before that, he hosted some of the capital’s more glamorous club nights. Now he does funerals to die for. If you were being all cute about it, you might say that going out in style is Oliver Peyton’s speciality.
‘Everyone was slightly freaked out when I said I was going to start a funeral business,’ Peyton tells me. ‘Like, “You’re out of your mind.” I mean, I was freaked out as well.’ Then he realised the connection between feeding people and burying their family members. ‘It’s a hospitality business. It’s about taking care of people. And the funny thing is, the amount of people I’ve done funerals for who used to go to the restaurants is unbelievable. It’s really quite weird.’
I mumble something about being certain there’s no direct causal link between having eaten regularly at Peyton’s restaurants and being, well, dead. But then, it occurs to me, these were hedonistic places. His clientele of media movers and showbiz shakers was not, 30 years ago, overly concerned with such dispiriting notions as ‘wellness’ or ‘longevity.’ Maybe Peyton’s natural progression is, after all, from starry party starter to master of ceremonies at fashionable send-offs?
‘With restaurants,’ he says, ‘I always tried to do something no one had done before. With funerals it’s far more challenging. It’s a completely undisrupted business, because it’s hard to do. You have to build trust. It takes time. You’ve got to have long pockets. So breaking the mould is something I’m very proud of.’
We’re talking on a Wednesday morning at the first of his three funeral parlours. Exit Here opened in 2019 on a leafy corner of west London’s Chiswick High Road, with a mission to shake up a business largely unchanged since Victoria waved off Albert for the final time. Today the deceased can also schedule departures in Crouch End and Chelsea. This year Exit Here will do about 350 funerals.
The Chiswick branch is giving Beverly Hills art gallery rather than your local Undertaker & Sons. It’s not black. There are no ruched curtains or pastel floral displays or gloomy sample tombstones. The colour scheme is white and blue, the shopfront sports floor-to-ceiling windows and a handwritten neon sign glows above the door. A coffin rests in the corner, decorated in the style of the Mexican Day of the Dead. So pleasant is the atmosphere, something almost approaching jolly, that one must remind oneself that the mortuary out back has storage for 14 corpses.
If the cartoon of a funeral director is a sombre figure in a top hat and tails, stiff as rigor mortis, Peyton’s here to disrupt that, too. An effervescent Irishman with a coat-hanger physique, high-voltage hair and main-character glasses, he crackles at 64 with the enthusiasm of a man 40 years his junior.
The UK funeral market is dominated by three ‘corporates’: Co-op Funeralcare, Dignity Group and Funeral Partners. Between them they own around 1,800 funeral homes. ‘It’s a conveyor belt,’ Peyton says, sipping coffee. ‘It’s a transport business.’ Funeral directors shift bodies, he suggests, as efficiently as possible from mortuary to coffin to urn or grave. Without, perhaps, paying close attention to individual tastes and requirements. In a word, Peyton says, the British funeral is ‘perfunctory.’ It typically fails to capture anything close to the character, let alone the spirit, of the deceased.
It was his disappointment at the impersonal nature of his own father’s funeral, in 2010, that sparked the idea for Exit Here. ‘There’s not just one type of restaurant. Why is there just one type of funeral director?’ More than that, ‘No two humans are the same. Why should everyone have the same funeral?’
It’s a commonplace that the British, especially the English, are no good at grief. Too much a-weepin’ and a-wailin’ is considered infra dig. We barely talk about death, let alone mark it with the flair of more demonstrative cultures. (Peyton is a particular fan of the Hindu way of death. ‘There’s a serenity to it.’) Brits are conditioned to meet their makers with a minimum of fuss.
‘It’s terrible the way we don’t talk about death,’ he says. ‘The pain people go through, particularly if it’s an unexpected death, is just enormous.’ Each Exit Here branch runs bereavement evenings, support groups for the grieving. ‘I was with someone last night,’ he says. ‘She hadn’t left the house for months. Her husband died prematurely and she just wasn’t ready for it. The tools available to people like that are just not good enough.’
Most funeral directors work on only the ceremony. They don’t involve themselves in wakes or receptions. Exit Here plans the whole day – ‘or two or three days,’ Peyton says. They’ve done a funeral on bicycles. A funeral where speakers were attached to the hearse, blasting Massive Attack as it drove down Chiswick High Road. An Exit Here funeral might include music, poetry, dancing. It might be in a church, pub or cinema. It might be in a field in Wales.
Peyton is protective of his clients’ anonymity but Exit Here mourners are often drawn from the same worlds he used to feed and water: media, fashion, the arts. His prices are competitive. ‘A good funeral is not about money,’ he says. ‘It’s about love. We try to do funerals whatever the budget is. One of the best [we’ve done] was no flowers, no music, no celebrant, a wicker coffin. They went into the crematorium and they just told stories for an hour.’
Peyton can remember the first dead body he saw. He was five or six. It belonged to his grandfather, his dad’s dad. He was laid out in the front room of the family home in rural County Mayo. People from the surrounding farms and villages came to pay their respects. ‘A funeral was a gathering,’ he says. ‘It was social. Everyone would drink poteen, Irish moonshine.’
Peyton arrived in England in 1979 to study textiles at Leicester Poly, dropping out after two years. He went to Brighton and opened a nightclub, The Can, with his friend the musician Andrew Hale, later of Sade. Norman Cook was the DJ. Moving to London, he and Hale threw one-off nights in Soho strip clubs. Then he opened Raw, beneath the Tottenham Court Road YMCA. It was the scene of many influential parties, including, for a time, Danny Rampling’s much mythologised acid house night, Shoom. Peyton is a man so unruffled that even in May 1988, he remembers, he could approach such pioneering shenanigans with nonchalance: ‘For me the Ibiza thing was already slightly over.’
I first heard Peyton’s name as a teenager in the early 90s when I was a regular at another Raw night, Billion Dollar Babes: drag queens, disco dancing, Davina McCall on the door. Those years, he says, are ‘when I had my most fun.’ Peyton was in his 20s, living in Marylebone, and ‘making a lot of money.’ He still sounds amazed at his own good fortune.
The restaurants were spectacular. As a tyro magazine hack in the late 90s, I was a frequent customer. Coast, in Mayfair, with sci-fi interiors designed by Marc Newson, was like eating in a Kubrickian vision of the future. Mash, just north of Oxford Circus, an experimental pizza joint (better than it sounds) with an in-house microbrewery, before anyone had heard of such a thing. There was also Mash & Air in Manchester, which Peyton gave up on when the local villains muscled in.
Most thrilling was the Atlantic, a restaurant of vaunting ambition and opulence, a grand, optimistic dining room for a grand, optimistic moment. (It closed in 2005 and is now Brasserie Zedel, which does a reasonable prix fixe for those who are ‘up for the day.’) Isola in Knightsbridge was Peyton’s great folly. By his own reckoning, he lost £7 million of his own money on the venture. ‘My biggest mistake,’ he says. ‘Completely emptied my tank.’
Since then, Peyton has opened bakeries and transformed museum dining rooms. For many years he was a judge on the BBC’s Great British Menu. But Exit Here is the business that has most fruitfully filled the gap left by restaurants.
Death becomes Oliver Peyton. ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘The job satisfaction is off the radar. When I leave here in the evening, I’m thankful for every step I take. I’m a better husband, a better father, a better friend.’
He has turned down offers from private equity to expand. Rather than open scores of branches of Exit Here, he’s decided he’s going to work less, rather than more. ‘It’s a hard-learnt lesson,’ he says. ‘We are brainwashed to work, to buy more stuff, to consume shit. And I’ve had to learn how to not worry about all that.
‘Restaurants have this habit of making you really rich and then really poor,’ he says. He’s been both and now considers himself neither. He’s fine with that. ‘I don’t need a yacht.’ He and his wife, Charlie Polizzi (hospitality aristocracy: granddaughter of Lord Forte), live in Acton. Their chief extravagance now is adventurous holidays, and he does love eating out, though he’s as shocked at today’s prices as any other punter. ‘A little bit of beef tartare on sourdough and it’s £15. Really?’
This is all very edifying. But isn’t spending so much time around the dead and the grief-stricken not (how to put this?) incredibly depressing?
‘It’s not depressing because we’re helping people,’ he says. ‘We’re helping them through their grief.’ Peyton says he leaves any anguish at the door. ‘If you take it home with you, you’re buggered.’
He plans lots of funerals for people who know they’re dying, and some for those who are not unwell but feel they ought to prepare anyway. He approves of this as a courtesy to others. ‘It’s ridiculous not to plan your funeral,’ he says. ‘It’s thoughtless. It’s mean.’ A family needs time to grieve. Instead, they’re worrying about what music mum would have chosen for her service.
When his own time comes, Peyton wants to be buried under a tree, in a natural burial ground – an increasingly popular option. There’ll be a long lunch, for which he has laid down the wine. ‘And then tons of dancing.’ He wants Andrew Hale to DJ. It’ll be like old times, only with one person missing.
A good funeral, he thinks, is ‘a good laugh and a good cry.’ And it can make a difference. ‘It’s a really important moment,’ he says. ‘You want to leave it with good memories. You want to say, “Yes, that was the person I loved.”’
