Living down to a reputation
Jane Gardam
CHARACTERS OF FITZRO VIA by Mike Pentelow and Marsha Rowe Chatto & Windus, £25, pp, 262, ISBN 0701173149 Chatto and Windus should be given a garland for publishing a lavish, expensively researched book quite unconcerned with the global market. It is entertaining, packed with history, characters, scandals, biographies of the famous and infamous over centuries and rich with colour plates, drawings and photographs. It is about a single, unlovely patch of central London approximately one and a half miles square.
'Fitzrovia' is a recent coinage. The authors call it 'arch, self-conscious and ironic', but it is also affectionate. The place has been attractive from the start. It amazed Defoe in 1725 when he worried about the green fields disappearing round it. 'When will they make an end and stop of building?' Its boundaries, set out in no less than four maps, are Oxford Street to the south, Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street to the east, Euston Road along the top and Portland Place running into Upper Regent Street and back to Oxford Circus to the west. It has no pivotal point and was never one of London's 150 villages, but its history began when the Roman garrisons marched down Oxford Street, which was there before London itself.
From there we go through to the 20th century: the two world wars, Burgess and Maclean and the decadent 1960s. The last photograph is of the unsavoury-looking Oz lads of 1971 en route to the Court of Appeal to plead their inherent decency. One of them, Felix Dennis, is now 'one of the hundred richest men in England', says the foreword to the book. He still keeps the head office of his publishing empire in Fitzrovia where it started in an evilsmelling garret. Now he drives up in a chauffeur-driven Rolls.
The Fitzroy Tavern on the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street is thought to be Fitzrovia's raison d'être but it has only been there since 1906. Before, it was the Hundred Marks Hotel in the middle of the German quarter. Fitzrovia attracted more-various immigrants than next-door Soho, which was less friendly and the shop-keepers never knew your name. Fitzrovia became the 'Bohemian quartier', 'thick with artists'. As recently as the 1950s the cafés were full of poets and until the Seventies a struggling student from London University's Gower Street or from the Middlesex hospital or a reader in the British Museum Library could eat well and cheaply in dozens of little restaurants. Schmidt and Bertorelli were the most famous. Schmidt had had windows broken in the war for being German, even though he had served in the British army. He employed 'the rudest waiters in the world' and never advertised. 'Our advertisement is on the plate.' This book doesn't mention the occasion during the Spanish civil war when the waiters of Schmidt and Bertorelli set about each other in a political streetfight. Maybe it is apocryphal.
The German pub became the Fitz to line it up with the street names round it. The Fitzroys were Dukes of Grafton and Earls of Euston and in the 18th century one of them thought to develop his estate by building elegant houses, squares and terraces. Their owners, however, found it was taking them hours to get into London because of the 'flocks of animals being led to market', so the Duke built a bypass which became the Euston Road. This inflamed the tenantry who said the roadworks were ruining their hay. Two formidable women, the Miss Cappers (there is still Capper Street), became manic about intruders and galloped about their meadows with shears to cut the strings of children's kites. In the 1960s, when the elegant houses were being pulled down again by property developers (the pretty gardens still growing apple trees) and the horrors that are there now were replacing them, the tenantry made the same complaints as their predecessors with as little effect.
Fitzrovia seems to be tamer since the 1960s. Writers and artists don't lunch. The long-haired boys have all become shaven. There are no raids on the gay clubs where men in frilly dresses were continually being carted off in black Marias. The expensive restaurants have changed their names and the menus are astronomic, though the lovely L'Etoile survives and its romantic upstairs dining-room. But we don't hear much about the old cheap rates for regulars and whether the impoverished great are still working quietly in lodgings is doubtful. When Karl Marx packed up and left Fitzrovia after finishing Des Kapital the librarian at the British Museum said, 'I don't know what happened to Mr Marx. One day he simply left and nobody has ever heard of him again.'
The index of this book is tiresome, but the illustrations are wonderful: Darwin
looking ruminative, noble and good, Virginia Woolf and her father side by side looking into the abyss, crazy Nancy Cunard and three mad friends — one is Diana Cooper — dolled up as Britannias with immense weaponry and glaring eyes. A group photograph that looks like the board of governers of a progressive school turns out to be the founders of the Surrealist movement, an infant Dali on a slant and peeping shyly. And there is Aleister Crowley, the devil-worshipper, a self-portrait and suitable case for treatment. His address was 'All Souls Place'? The residents of Fitzrovia, we are told 'never pretended to harmony'. A book to keep and a book to give.
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