St Martin’s Lane’s cut-glass survivor is one of the prettiest interiors in London, and everyone in it is checking the time
The Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane is a Victorian gin palace that somehow survived the twentieth century with its face intact. Cut and etched glass, polished mahogany, bronze nymphs holding up the light fittings, a bar back like the altar of a small cathedral. Four thousand people have reviewed it. It has 4.3 stars. It should have more, and the reason it doesn’t is not the pub’s fault.
The problem with being beautiful in Theatreland
Nobody is at the Salisbury. Everybody is on their way somewhere. It sits directly opposite the stage doors of half the West End, which means the room is permanently full of people with a curtain-up time, drinking at a pace determined by a schedule they did not set, glancing at a phone every ninety seconds.
You cannot settle in a pub where the entire population is going to leave at 7:20 in a single wave. The Salisbury has one of the finest interiors in London and it is experienced almost exclusively by people who are, in a meaningful sense, already gone.
The glass
Go anyway, and look up, and look sideways, and look at the partitions. The etched glass is the real thing – the kind that was installed in the 1890s so that the different classes of drinker could not see each other, which is a detail that repays some thought while you are standing shoulder to shoulder with a hen party from Solihull.
Very little of this survives elsewhere. The Blitz took some, the 1960s took more, and a great deal of the rest was ripped out in the 1980s by breweries who thought the future was carpet. The Salisbury still has it. The Salisbury is, structurally, an accident of neglect, and it is glorious.
The actors
They are there. They have always been there – the pub has been the local for the theatre trade for well over a century – and they are extremely easy to spot, because they are the only people in the building not looking at a phone, and they are speaking at a volume calibrated for the back of the stalls.
The Institute for Ambient Projection in Clapton has measured the Salisbury’s baseline conversational volume at 11 decibels above a comparable pub, an effect it attributes entirely to the presence of trained voices ordering crisps.
The beer, briefly
Fine. Perfectly fine. A serviceable range, poured competently, at £20-£30 a head, which is not why you came and everybody involved knows it. You came for the glass. The beer is a formality – a ticket price for standing inside a listed interior for forty minutes.
Verdict
One of the most beautiful pub rooms in Britain, operating as a departure lounge. Go on a Sunday afternoon when there is no matinee and no evening show, order something slowly, and stand in the middle of it while it is nearly empty. It is the only hour of the week when the Salisbury gets to be a pub instead of a corridor.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
