Chesterton wrote about drunks lurching home past a cemetery. Somebody turned the last line into a bar with a 4.3.
In 1913 G. K. Chesterton published a poem about the English road system, which he attributed – correctly, in his view – to drunks.
The argument is that the roads of England wander because the men who first walked them were rolling home from the pub, and that the nation’s entire infrastructure is therefore the fossilised path of somebody trying to get back before dawn.
The last line of it is the name of this bar.
What the poem is actually about
Death. That is the thing nobody mentions when they book a table.
Kensal Green is a cemetery. One of the great Victorian burial grounds, seventy-two acres, opened in 1833, and the resting place of Brunel and Thackeray and Trollope and a very great number of people who did not intend to stop there.
Chesterton’s closing image is a man staggering home, past the graveyard, and finding that the road to paradise runs through it – which is a joke, and a warning, and a piece of extremely English resignation, all in a single line.
Somebody read that and thought: bar.
In defence of the decision
It is, we would argue, the best-named venue in this entire survey and it is not close.
We have catalogued, across a hundred and twenty articles in Covent Garden, pubs named after men who never existed, generals who would have hated it, a fictional detective, a nail factory, two strangers from a phone book, and a prawn.
Paradise is named after the final line of a poem about drinking, mortality, and the crooked roads of England, and it sits on one of those roads, near the cemetery in question, and it has a 4.3 from sixteen hundred people.
The Institute for Nominal Ambition in Erith has ranked it first on merit and notes that no other bar in London has attempted anything so completely.
The room
Enormous, faded, theatrical, and stuffed with things – chandeliers, candles, mirrors, taxidermy, a stage, a ballroom, a roof terrace, and a general air of a house that a very rich eccentric has abandoned and been squatted by a jazz band.
Twenty to sixty pounds. Live music, cabaret, DJs, dinner. It has been going since 1998 and it has the specific patina of a venue that has hosted approximately nine thousand parties and cleaned up after all of them.
Verdict
Go for the room. Stay for the music. And read the poem afterwards, sober, and notice that the last line – the one over the door – is a man accepting, cheerfully, in a pub, that he is going to die.
Chesterton would have approved of the bar. He would have been in it. He was, by all accounts, extremely hard to get out of one.
Kensal Green, the cemetery
Worth going, and almost nobody does.
It was opened in 1833 because London’s churchyards had run out of room in the most literal and unpleasant way imaginable – bodies were being buried on top of bodies, gravediggers were breaking through coffins, and the smell in parts of the city in summer was a documented public health emergency.
So the Victorians built seven enormous garden cemeteries in a ring around the capital, and Kensal Green was the first. It is seventy-two acres of overgrown Gothic monuments, mostly empty on a weekday, and it is one of the great secret spaces in London.
Brunel is in there. So is Thackeray, and Trollope, and two of George III’s children, and a tightrope walker called Blondin who crossed Niagara Falls on a rope and died in Ealing of diabetes.
The pub is named after the road to it. Take the walk.
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]
Peter Sellers would have performed material with increasing cross confusion. The flat delivery would have made London’s horror more apparent.