The Royal Society of Arts was founded in 1754 to make Britain better. Benjamin Franklin was a member. You can now have a Negroni in the basement.
The Royal Society of Arts was founded in a coffee house in 1754 with an objective of almost comical ambition: to embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve manufactures and extend commerce.
Not one of those things. All of them. The entire national project, in a sentence, drafted by men who genuinely believed a society could be improved by argument.
Benjamin Franklin was a member. Adam Smith was a member. Karl Marx gave a lecture in the building. Charles Dickens was a member. So was Dr Johnson.
You can now get a cocktail in the vaults underneath it. Fifty-nine people have reviewed the bar. They gave it a 4.8.
The building
RSA House is on John Adam Street – and yes, we have been here before, at Theodore Bullfrog, and at Smith and Wollensky, because this is the Adelphi, and the Adam brothers built it, and most of it was destroyed in 1936.
RSA House survived. It is an original Adam interior, and beneath it are the vaults – brick arches, low, raw, built to hold up a terrace that no longer entirely exists.
The bar is down there. You are drinking inside the foundations of the Enlightenment, in a building that has been arguing about how to improve Britain for two hundred and seventy years, and the cocktails are ten to twenty pounds, which is cheaper than most of Covent Garden.
What the RSA actually did
A partial list, because it is genuinely startling.
It ran prizes to solve national problems – and got results. It campaigned on public health, on child labour, on education. It was central to the organisation of the Great Exhibition of 1851. It invented the blue plaque scheme, which is why there is a blue disc on half the buildings you walk past.
It has been, for two and a half centuries, an organisation of people meeting in a room to work out how to make things less bad, and it has an unglamorous, cumulative, entirely real record of having done so.
The 4.8
Fifty-nine reviews, which is a small sample and we have been strict about this all series. But 4.8 is 4.8, and the room is extraordinary, and the drinks are properly made, and the price is fair.
The reason nobody has reviewed it is that most people do not know they are allowed in. It reads as private. It looks private. It is, in fact, open, and this is the single best-kept secret in the Adelphi.
Franklin, in London
Worth a paragraph. Benjamin Franklin lived in London for the better part of sixteen years, on Craven Street, a few hundred metres from here – the same street, incidentally, that the Ship and Shovell is wedged into.
He was in this city as an agent for the American colonies, trying to hold the relationship together, and he was on the whole enjoying himself enormously. He was a member of the RSA. He was doing science. He liked London.
He went home in 1775 and helped write the Declaration of Independence.
The house on Craven Street is still there and is a museum, and almost nobody goes, and it is four minutes from this bar.
Verdict
Go down into the vaults. Have a drink under the arches. And consider that you are sitting in the cellar of a building where, for two hundred and seventy years, people have been trying to fix the country by talking about it in a room – which is, whatever else you think, the same thing you are doing tonight, and considerably more useful.
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]
