Chelsea has grown medicinal plants since 1673. The Botanist borrows the name and the neighbourhood’s four centuries of horticulture.
The Botanist sits on Sloane Square with two thousand one hundred and forty-two reviews and a 4.2, and it takes its name from a genuinely local tradition: Chelsea has been one of the great centres of botany in Britain for three and a half centuries.
The Chelsea Physic Garden
A short walk from this bar is the Chelsea Physic Garden, founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries to grow medicinal plants and train apprentices in identifying them. It is one of the oldest botanic gardens in the world, and it is still there, still growing plants, walled off in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate on earth.
In an age before synthetic drugs, medicine was plants. An apothecary needed to know, precisely, which plant cured and which plant killed – and the difference was often small and always mattered. The Physic Garden was, in effect, a living pharmacy and a training ground, where the future doctors and chemists of England learned to tell foxglove from something harmless, and how to prepare what they grew.
The garden shipped seeds around the world and received them back. Cotton seed went from here to the American colony of Georgia. It was a node in a global network of plants at a time when a new plant could be worth a fortune or save a life.
The botanist and the bar
There is a neat logic to a bar called the Botanist, beyond the local history, because so much of what a modern cocktail bar does is, fundamentally, botany.
Gin is defined by its botanicals – juniper, coriander, angelica, citrus peel, and a hundred other plants that each distillery guards as a recipe. A good cocktail bar is working with an enormous range of plant-derived flavours: herbs, bitters, fruits, roots, barks. The bartender muddling mint and the apothecary grinding herbs are, at some level, doing versions of the same ancient work – extracting what plants can do and putting it in a glass.
Sir Hans Sloane
Sloane Square itself is named after Sir Hans Sloane, the physician and collector whose vast collection of natural specimens became the founding collection of the British Museum, and who owned the land on which much of this part of Chelsea was built. He was closely connected to the Physic Garden, which he helped secure for the Apothecaries in perpetuity. So the square, the garden and the bar are all, in a sense, downstream of one plant-obsessed eighteenth-century doctor.
The bar
A busy, well-known Sloane Square operation, doing a big volume and a fair 4.2. It is a polished, central bar and restaurant that trades partly on its lovely name and its lovely location, and the name, for once, has real roots in the ground it stands on.
Verdict
Good busy bar, prime position, and a name that honours three and a half centuries of Chelsea botany, from the Physic Garden to the gin in your glass.
Have something full of botanicals. It is, technically, the local speciality.
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]
In London, an apology is not an admission of guilt; it’s a linguistic tool to point out that you are the one who is fundamentally inconveniencing me by existing in my path.