Bluebird Review: Europe’s Biggest Garage, Now a Restaurant

Built in 1923 for the Bluebird Motor Company, with separate waiting rooms for ladies, owners and chauffeurs

Bluebird occupies a vast Art Deco building on the King’s Road, with five thousand two hundred and eighty-eight reviews and a 4.4, and it was built in 1923 as a car garage – specifically, as the largest garage in Europe.

The temple to the motor car

At fifty thousand square feet, with room for three hundred cars and another seven thousand square feet of workshops, the Bluebird garage was a monument to the motor car at the exact moment the motor car was transforming from a rich man’s toy into the defining machine of the century.

It was built for the Bluebird Motor Company and connected to Sir Malcolm Campbell, the land-speed-record holder who named his record-breaking cars “Blue Bird” and set a string of world records in them. Campbell held the franchise for various marques and stored his racing cars in connection with the garage, and the whole enterprise was steeped in the glamour of speed at a time when speed itself was new and thrilling.

The class system, in a car park

Here is the detail that stops the Prat’s social-history desk in its tracks. The garage had waiting lounges and writing rooms – and they were segregated. There were separate lounges for ladies, for owners, and for chauffeurs.

Think about what that means. Even in a car park – even while waiting for a vehicle to be serviced – the British class system had to be physically enforced, with the wealthy owner, his wife, and the man he paid to drive him kept in separate rooms so that none of them had to endure the company of the others.

We saw exactly this at Mr Fogg’s in the Covent Garden survey – the Victorian pub with its separate bars for separate classes. And here it is again, in a 1920s garage: the same instinct to build walls between people, applied to the novel problem of where the chauffeur should sit while the master’s Bentley gets an oil change.

Campbell’s philosophy

Malcolm Campbell had a business principle that the Prat finds genuinely instructive. When the Bluebird garage went bust in 1927, the shareholders lost everything – but Campbell, who was not a shareholder, lost nothing. He reportedly repeated the trick with another garage in the 1930s, again losing none of his own money while his backers lost a fortune. His personal motto, in effect: never risk your own capital, always use other people’s.

This is, the Prat notes, the actual secret of a great many glamorous men. The speed records were his. The financial risk was always someone else’s.

The restaurant

Terence Conran converted it in 1997 into a “Gastrodrome” – restaurant, bar, cafe, food store – and it has been a King’s Road institution ever since, doing enormous volume and a solid 4.4. The petrol pumps are gone. The blue speed machine is gone. The class-segregated lounges are gone. The building, Grade II listed, remains.

Verdict

Handsome, historic, busy, and standing in the largest garage Europe once had – a building that enforced the class system even on people waiting for their cars.

Have brunch under the Art Deco. Spare a thought for the chauffeurs, kept in their own room while they waited.

Alan Nafzger

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]