It is themed as a wartime Underground station. Around a hundred and fifty thousand people slept in the real ones.
Cahoots is a cocktail bar in a former tunnel off Kingly Court, holds a 4.6 from five thousand two hundred and thirty-four people, and is themed as a disused Underground station during the Blitz.
There is a tube carriage. There is a ticket hall. The staff are in character. It is extremely well done and it is enormous fun.
And the thing it is imitating was one of the grimmest experiences this city has ever had.
What actually happened down there
The government did not want people sheltering in the Underground. It was official policy to prevent it – the fear was of a deep shelter mentality, of a population that went down and did not come back up, and of the disruption to the railway.
The public did it anyway. They bought a penny ticket and simply stayed, in numbers the authorities could not remove, and the policy collapsed within weeks.
At the peak, around a hundred and fifty thousand people were sleeping in the tube network every night.
The conditions
For a long period there were no lavatories. There were buckets, behind a screen, and they had to be carried up in the morning.
There was no ventilation to speak of, and a platform holding several thousand people, overnight, in summer, is a specific and unforgettable experience that everybody who was there described in the same terms.
There were no bunks initially – people slept on the platform, and on the escalators, and in the space between the rails once the current was off, and the trains were still running until the last one had gone.
Bunks, canteens and lavatories were eventually installed. It took months.
And it was not safe
Which is the thing the theme cannot include.
Balham station took a direct hit in October 1940. The bomb cracked the road, the tunnel filled with water, gas and sewage, and around sixty-five people were killed.
Bank station was hit in January 1941 and the blast went down the escalators.
And at Bethnal Green in 1943, a crowd going down the stairs in the dark – responding to an unfamiliar sound, which was a new anti-aircraft rocket – fell, and a hundred and seventy-three people were crushed to death in a stairwell. Sixty-two of them were children.
No bomb fell. It was the deadliest single incident on the British home front and it was caused by a staircase, a wet night, and no handrail.
What we do with it
We make a bar.
And the Prat is not going to be pious about this, because five thousand people have given it a 4.6 and they are having a lovely time, and the Blitz is now eighty-five years ago, and every generation makes light of the thing before last.
We would simply record what is being made light of.
Verdict
Excellent bar, superb theme, genuinely well-made drinks. Ten to fifty pounds.
Go, and enjoy it, and know that the real ones had no lavatories.
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]
My mate’s in politics and he said the real problem with it is it’s showing people what they already knew but couldn’t say aloud.