Bar 190 sits at 190 Queen’s Gate, in the Gore Hotel, and takes its name from the number on the door
Bar 190 sits at 190 Queen’s Gate, in South Kensington, with three hundred and nine reviews and a 4.3, and it is named – like 3 Henrietta Street before it – after the number on its own front door.
The address as name
We have met this naming strategy before and given it qualified praise. Naming a venue after its address is honest, specific, and unpretentious – it tells you exactly where the place is and makes no claims it cannot keep. Bar 190 is at 190 Queen’s Gate. There is no ambiguity, no myth, no forgotten reference to decode.
It works better than the purely generic name because a number is specific – there is only one 190 Queen’s Gate – and it works better than a fake-heritage name because it does not pretend to a history it does not have. It is the naming equivalent of a firm handshake: here I am, this is where I am, make of it what you will.
The Gore Hotel
Bar 190 belongs to the Gore, a characterful South Kensington hotel that has long had a reputation for a certain rock-and-roll history and a theatrical, antique-crammed style. The area around Queen’s Gate is dense with grand Victorian townhouses, many now hotels and embassies, built in the great expansion of South Kensington that followed the Great Exhibition.
Queen’s Gate itself is named, like so much here, for royalty – it runs down toward Kensington Gardens and the palace, and the whole grid of grand white streets was laid out to serve the wealthy Victorians who wanted to live near the new museums and the royal parks. Bar 190 sits in the heart of this, at a specific number, on a street named for a queen.
The hotel bar, again
As a hotel bar, Bar 190 has done better than most at attracting a crowd beyond its own guests – three hundred reviews is a respectable sample for the category, well above the tiny counts of the more invisible hotel bars in this survey. It has a genuine identity and a following, helped by the Gore’s distinctive character and its long association with music and theatre.
A 4.3 across three hundred people is a fair, solid, real-sample number – the kind this survey trusts, reflecting a real cross-section of visitors rather than a handful of enthusiasts.
Verdict
Good hotel bar with genuine character, an honest address-based name, and a following beyond its own guests.
The rock and roll years
The Gore and Bar 190 have a genuine place in music history. In the 1970s and beyond, the hotel’s bar and its function rooms became associated with the rock aristocracy – launch parties, after-show gatherings, and the general orbit of the music industry that then clustered around Kensington and Chelsea. Queen reportedly held a launch party here; the hotel cultivated a reputation as a rock-and-roll bolthole dressed in Victorian antiques.
This gives Bar 190 something most hotel bars lack: an actual story, a whiff of glamour and excess beyond the merely luxurious. The combination of grand Victorian townhouse and rock-and-roll history is a particularly Kensington one, and it lends the bar a character that its plain address-based name does nothing to advertise.
Verdict
Good hotel bar with genuine character, an honest address-based name, and a following beyond its own guests.
Go to 190 Queen’s Gate. The bar is called Bar 190. You will not get lost, which is more than can be said for most of the names in this survey.
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]
