100 London things: 56

Jan 16, 2013 19:34


Not perhaps quite such a name to conjure with as Soho, Chelsea, or Bloomsbury, nonetheless Fitzrovia has significant claims to be one of London's Boho Centrals.

Even before these epics of pub-crawling -
By the time Julian Maclaren-Ross met Tambimuttu and Dylan Thomas in the early 1940s this literary group had moved away from the Fitzroy Tavern, which had become a victim of its own success, and were hanging out in the lesser-known Wheatsheaf and others in Rathbone Place and Gresse Street. Maclaren-Ross recalls Tambimuttu saying: "Now we go to the Black Horse, the Burglar's Rest, the Marquess of Granby, The Wheatsheaf... in Fitzrovia." Maclaren-Ross replied: "I know the Fitzroy" to which Tambimuttu said: "Ah, that was in the Thirties, now they go to other places. Wait and see." Tambimuttu then took him on a pub crawl.

it had significant form as the place for writers and artists to hang out.

While information seems a bit vague, it appears to have been one of the locations of Elsa Lanchester's theatre-cum-nightclub, the Cave of Harmony, during the 1920s.

Cleveland Street was, of course, the locale of the Cleveland Street Scandal.

Marie Stopes moved her birth control clinic to Whitfield Street in 1925, and the building is now the HQ of the sexual health charity Marie Stopes International.

However, most of the other medical establishments in the area are now closed: the Middlesex Hospital, the London Foot Hospital, the Hospital for the Clergy (for people suffering with a bad case of the dreaded clergy...)

There is also Pollocks Toy Museum

A statue of the South American revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda can be found in Fitzroy Square.

Among the manifold delights of the area la patronne racommande aussi Navarros Tapas,

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london, revolutionaries, restaurants, theatre, scandal, 100 things, medicine, contraception, bohemians, toys, museums, homosexuality, performance

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