Dear Readers,
Good evening from a muggy Soho. It’s jumpers-around-necks weather here, and that looks set to continue for the next week onwards, which is great news for those of you looking to plunge headfirst into our cultural buffet. On that note, a special shout-out to Jimmy Outram, who made the trip to Eynsford last week (as per our recommendations). It was not an optimal time to visit.
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We’re travelling across London today, but we’re starting with something a little different. Everyone knows where the capital’s best wine lists are to be pilfered – Andrew Edmunds, Hide, Noizé – but what about the worst wine list in the capital? We assembled a largely anonymous panel of sommeliers, chefs, restaurateurs and critics to crown the plonkiest place in town. Vibes? Value-for-money? Breadth and depth? They’re all part of the equation.
In Vino Veritas
At the start of the century, or even just 15 years ago, voicing opinions about wine was terminally uncool behaviour, the sort of ‘banter’ that suggests rank craving for a Garrick Club membership. Now, Zone 2 London is loaded with well-meaning youngsters on precarious incomes spending silly money on big bottles that they’ve saved up for months to savour. Of course, the F&B industry has adapted itself accordingly to the new consumers (new marks) with their typical rat-like cunning.
There are so many great wine lists in London – so many new wine-centred restaurants too – that you would think it would prove tricky to drink badly in the capital today. But that is not true. There are the W1 rip-off joints that leave your wallet howling with rage, and there are great old establishments that haven’t adjusted to the taste pathways of the present day.
Unsurprisingly, many of our expert panel have strong views about natural wine, or low-intervention wine as it is more commonly known now. There are a number of establishments in north and east London that were at the forefront of the movement. There were a few nominations – all anonymously placed – for the Blackstock Road bistro, Top Cuvée, which really wedded itself to the ‘natty aesthetic’ and in the words of one chef, ‘Epitomise the splosh some horse piss in a bottle, cap it, and slap a funky label on it’.
For Jay Rayner – who was happy to be quoted – the most outrageous example can be found on Piccadilly, at the Greek restaurant Gaia, ‘a ludicrous wine list with a few cooks attached’. Another man who was happy to go on the record was Andy Hayler, who at one stage was the only person alive to have eaten at every three-star Michelin restaurant on the planet. As readers of Andy Hayler’s writing know, Andy is a veritable compendium of knowledge on restaurant wine prices. To him, the most ridiculous prices he’s encountered have been at Chez Roux at the Langham Hotel, where, on average, the wines listed are marked up 4.5 times their cost at retail value (and yet they still have the audacity to misspell ‘Sauterns’).
Despite a few blows for the ‘heavily tattooed Aussie fuckwit somm’ and the establishments they frequent, there were far more nominations for beloved London institutions from those on the panel who wished to maintain their anonymity. Le Beaujolais is a family-owned club and restaurant, essentially unchanged since 1972. It was the first French wine bar in London. Being rude about the wine list there is a bit like telling your grandmother that she’s a bitch. And yet: it is expensive, unimaginative and boring. Is the same true at St. JOHN, perhaps the most iconic and influential restaurant in the capital? Many feel it is impossible to get anything good for less than £80 there, and that their own-label range feel ‘cheaply made’.
The overwhelming winner, though, of the worst wine list in London, is a family-owned centuries-old bar that is thronged every night of the week. Every Londoner, at some stage of their lives, has had a drink at Gordon’s Wine Bar. The atmosphere – much vaunted on TripAdvisor – feels a bit ‘Jorvik Viking Centre by candlelight’. As for the list, it’s not unimaginative, and it’s not offensively dear, but it should be so much more given its history and its name. Most egregious of all? The recent deployment of iPads. Whatever happened, you may ask, to tradition?
Not That Heath, Another Heath
Tired of your local? Exhausted by your usual pub crawl? The solution, as ever, can be found on the fringes of the capital, in the London Borough of Bexley. Ian Nairn tipped us off to the borough’s boozy potential, albeit from the grave. Nairn’s London (1966) commends the Grade II-listed King’s Head on Bexley High Street as a platonic cross-section of life in the as-yet unincorporated village, and too right he was, although it has moved with the times over the last sixty years. On a stolen Saturday afternoon, we ate northern Thai sausages at a centuries-old bar while punters made unprintable jokes about recent news events. Midway through, the pub’s proceedings paused to allow a 105-year-old woman, accompanied by the area’s mayor, to enter her birthday party in the back room.
The confusingly named Bexleyheath, north of Bexley proper, has yet more jewels. You can get to Bexleyheath by train quite easily; catch a Southeastern out of Charing Cross or Victoria, and you’ll pull in forty minutes later, in about the same length of time as changing across three tubes to meet mates in some awful park. But the best route is by bus, where, charging up Shooters’ Hill and through Oxleas Woods, you can experience a truly unusual vista, one which turns away from the glassy, glimmering city, looking out toward the flat, ordered plains of Kent. For £1.75, there’s no finer way to leave London behind you.
Make immediate plans to visit the Robin Hood & Little John, but be mindful of their opening times: this family-run pub closes for a few hours each afternoon, to allow for a little siesta. This is not the only touch of European flair in this resolutely Kentish backstreet pub. The family matriarch, Caterina, grew up in Campania, and so an Italian special can always be found amid the toasties and baguettes of their pub-grub menu. On the day of our visit, it was a gorgeous, fortifying spaghetti alla puttanesca, appropriately briny and livened up with a blaze of house chilli oil. One of the best pubs in the country, never mind the capital.
After three pints and a steadying bowl of pasta, saunter over to the area’s prized tourist attraction: the Red House, a castle built for William Morris by his friend, Philip Webb, with interiors styled by the man himself, and painted by his other friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. You’ll have to join a tour group to go inside – the volunteers encourage you to book in advance, but arrive with impudence and they’ll find you a spot. You may even be in a group with some anoraks who can, and will, provide unsolicited info about the great man and his wallpaper designs. And you know what, fair enough – if there’s one place to really go off about wallpaper, it’s here.
For your final pint of the day, go to the Royal Oak, although you’ll soon learn that the locals never call the place by its trading name. Instead, it’s known universally as the Polly, short for ‘The Polly Clean Stairs’. What could that possibly mean? Was there a landlady called Polly, renowned for feverishly polishing the stairs of her pub at the turn of the century? Yes, yes there was – the plaque outside the place tells you so upon entry. The interior suffers from the maladies that have befallen so many grand old pubs nationwide (fresh grey paint in excelsis; an ‘I BET YOU LOOK GOOD ON THE DANCEFLOOR’ wall canvas) but the chatter is lively, the garden’s enormous, and it all feels miles away from the local haunts that have long since started haunting you back.
Mossy’s Manor
Wander into Croydon’s Whitgift shopping centre this week and you might hear a muffled rendition of Kanye West’s 2016 track Ultralight Beam. This isn’t a stop on the wayward ex-star’s cursed world tour but the soundtrack to Arthur Jafa’s seminal video work, Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), which is joined by Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) for an excellent exhibition fittingly titled HARDCORE / LOVE.
Hosted by studio provider Conditions, the show opened late last month with an event that saw the international art world’s trendier contingent gather under the Whitgift’s flickering striplights. Gallerist Sadie Coles, experimental producer Klein, and friend of The Fence, Dean Kissick, who appeared to have arrived straight from the airport, were all in attendance. Gavin Brown, the Croydon-born cult dealer who organised the show, surveyed the scene with glassy eyes. Jafa and Leckey both tickled the decks at the after-party, which shook South Bermondsey’s Ormside Projects until 5am.
Now, few of you are likely to find yourselves drifting around London’s southernmost borough of your own volition, which begs the question: are these two videos, totalling less than 30 minutes in length, worth travelling for? They are indeed. Both works are composed of archival footage that has been chopped, cut, freaked and tweaked by their respective creators to make cultural and political documents that are by turns rousing and devastating.
Hardcore finds profundity in the rave, splicing bygone dancefloor scenes and subcultural gatherings from the 1970s onwards to create a contradictory atmosphere of hauntedness and euphoria. Frenetic moves, sweaty foreheads and rotating jaws come together to render a way back when that feels more unreachable and tragically ancient with each passing year. Love, on the other hand, is a brutal antidote to nostalgia. Bringing together family home footage, television moments and scenes from daily life, it attempts to distill the diversity and tragedy of the African American experience. Moments after Obama at the lectern, you’ll see mobile phone footage of a civilian murdered by cops. Both works are opuses that bite off huge chunks of human history and somehow manage to gulp down and digest them, leaving viewers sated and stirred.
On your way back to civilization, we recommend stopping in Elephant and Castle for baby gallery Gnossienne’s group show Les Diplomates. Look out for the tantalisingly vague and elliptical paintings of Lulua Alyahya, a recent Slade graduate who we’re putting our money on to be London’s next favourite painter. Please, nobody tell Saatchi Yates.
Which Way, Western Man?
This fascinating shop front on Falcon Road in Battersea has been a point of fascination for locals for many years. Who is Pleckbond and how has such a disused-looking building stood so resolutely for so long?
The answer it seems, is communism, specifically the New Communist Party of Britain, who have been using the premises to print their magazine the New Worker for many years. ‘Pleckbond’ was just a name invented by their financial adviser to use as an umbrella name.
However, a search of some of the real names attached to the business on Companies House brings up some interesting history. Alex Kempshall, listed as a director, was the national chair of the NCP when they took a trip in 2001 to North Korea, as a British delegation. Their report back is a wonderfully lucid insight into a regime all too easily tarnished in western media.
For example, where we often think of North Korea as an oppressive military state, the report points out that this just part of the DPRK’s ‘army first policy’, noting that ‘In a capitalist country this would be alarming but in the DPRK the army is so closely integrated with the people that it could not be used against them.’ They were also impressed with Pyongyang’s clean and tidy streets, with perfectly weeded flowerbeds. ‘We were told that housewives often do this voluntarily and so do groups of children during school holidays.’ The report’s authors praised ‘the leadership of Kim Il Sung and his successor Kim Jong Il has given the country a staggeringly high level of social cohesion and commitment.’
For now, the building remains where it is, its grubby windows hiding its vital, revolutionary work. It seems it will remain safe in the hands of its cadres who boast phenomenal titles over the years, including ‘Member of the Young Communist League’s West of England agitprop group.’ As for now, it seems the greatest trick Pleckbond ever pulled was convincing the world he ever existed in the first place.
If you have any mystery buildings you would like to know about or any you have an inside tip on, do let us know at editorial@the-fence.com
A Rare Groove
You might think we are going to end up with our usual Alan Bennett-style ecclesiastical reverie. Wrong! We’re going clubbing. The Old Church in Stoke Newington is the only surviving Elizabethan Church in London, and these days, it is also a venue for live music with an astonishing acoustic which its organisers utilise with an unusually wide array of genres for a church space. There is the traditional hymn stuff as well as music from the wider choral world, including the brilliant Idrîsî Ensemble, whom we recommended a few letters back as part of Through The Noise, a great way to hear about unusual concerts around London.
But from here, the music on offer spreads out considerably. They have hosted names such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and often host DJs and electronic music artists on their stops around European tours, music rarely played in such spaces. On top of this, it is simply a beautiful building with a fitting graveyard to match.
Moreover, as it is now just a not for profit arts venue rather than a functioning church, there is no danger of your concert being cut short by an angry bishop in a dressing gown reminding you all that this is his house, and how he hates the terrible racket he agreed to let you make in said home for a fee.
There we have it, we hope you enjoyed that. As ever, do get in touch with us at editorial@the-fence.com with any tips. If you really enjoyed yourself, please share this with friends, either IRL or on ‘socials’ – it really does make a big difference. We hope you have a lovely start to August, and we’ll catch you a fortnight hence.
All the best,
TF