If you want to write something for the anthology but you don’t know where to start, here is a list of different kinds of storytelling you could use: There are many different forms of creative nonfiction for you to choose from. The story goes that the gang made her down five pints, which she duly did, after which the leader was so impressed he paid up and left with no further trouble.Not sure what to write or where to start? No problem! The ruffians were so enraged by the landlord so much as expecting recompense that they began to smash up the place, only stopping after being confronted by Lynne.
Burgess and his wife, Lynne, were said to have been drinking inside when a London “razor gang” burst in, drank up and refused to pay. We stop outside the Duke Of York pub, where Nick, affable, chatty and easily distracted, recalls the evening that might have given author Anthony Burgess the idea for Alex’s “ultra-violence” in A Clockwork Orange. Today perhaps better known for its adaptation in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Cats, the verse sounds as razor-sharp and brimming with wit as it ever has but Nick’s performance is given an additional kick by the knowledge that Eliot might have mulled over the poem after a jar or two in the pub opposite. It was not a legal condition but the authority suggested that staff should complete one transaction before moving onto the next customer.įitzrovia, though a hotbed of literary boozing, where in their time, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and even Dr Johnson would have wet their whistle, is not all dank womanising and horror films.Īcross the road from the Marquis of Granby, at 5pm beginning to bustle with post-work pints, Nick, who created the tour in 2012 and has run it since, normally employing the skills of two actors (one to play Dickens, the other Woolf) but is today flying solo, recites TS Eliot’s poem, The Naming of Cats. In 2012, its popularity got the better of it when Westminster Council said staff at the Newman Arms should serve their customers more slowly if they are to retain their licence. Named after once-local landowner William Berners, whose country seat was Newman Hall in Quendon, Essex, the pub in recent decades was popular with BBC staff and Soho advertising executives. Today, the pub remains small and cosy with a hard flagstone floor but is owned by Truman’s Brewery (of Brick Lane fame), retaining its focus on serving real ale and good pies (there is a pie room upstairs). A wine licence was awarded in 1948, and a spirits one in 1960. This did not put off Orwell and his clan, who frequented the venue to the point where, until recently, a grainy image of the author hung framed behind the bar.
Nick then proudly reveals that developers once took down the poor woman, but he campaigned successfully to have her returned to her rightful position peering over lingering pavement drinkers.Īt this point, and for the next 100 years, it was afforded by authorities a beer-only licence, meaning no spirits or wines could be served on the premises. It seems in days gone by the alley wasn’t necessary. Stood on the pavement outside, Nick points to the painted image of a women in a top-floor window, a nod to the Newman Arms’ time as a brothel.
George Orwell, another regular, used the establishment as inspiration for the “Proles” pub in dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where protagonist Winston Smith tries and fails to find out about life before the revolution. The pub is the third stop on a walking tour of the area led by Nick Hennegan, founder of the London Literary Pub Crawl, and a popular hangout for the likes of Maclaren-Ross, author of Of Love and Hunger but perhaps better-known for his role in the creative milieu of this London neighbourhood just north of Oxford Street. The presence of the Newman Arms next door, on Rathbone Street, might have had something to do with the corridor’s less than salubrious reputation. Maclaren-Ross ventured that the dark, narrow passageway might be somewhere “one sometimes guided girls in order to become better acquainted”. Committed dandy and literary bohemian Julian Maclaren-Ross once described Fitzrovia’s Newman Passage as Jekyll and Hyde Alley, on account, one assumes, that someone might enter with a decorum befitting Dr Henry Jekyll and emerge as evil as Mr Edward Hyde.