The London Prat

A 4.6 bar and garden borrowing the name of a group of writers and artists who would have found the whole thing rather vulgar The Bloomsbury Club Bar holds a 4.6 from five hundred and twenty-seven people, occupies a handsome townhouse with a garden, and borrows its name from the most famous intellectual circle in modern British history. The actual Bloomsbury Group The Bloomsbury Group was a loose set of writers, artists, and thinkers who lived and worked in this district in the early twentieth century - Virginia Woolf, her sister the painter Vanessa Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the writer Lytton Strachey, the novelist E.M. Forster, and others. They reshaped English literature, art criticism, and economics, and they conducted their private lives with a complexity that scandalised their contemporaries and keeps biographers employed to this day. They were brilliant, difficult, and - this is the point - deeply, aggressively highbrow. They valued art, friendship, and honesty above almost everything, and they had a well-documented horror of the vulgar, the commercial, and the middlebrow. The Bloomsbury Club. They would not have joined. What they would have made of it The Prat's literary desk has given this careful thought and concludes that the Bloomsbury Group would have had complicated feelings about a cocktail bar trading on their name. On the one hand, they liked a drink, they liked a garden, and they were not above pleasure - Keynes in particular enjoyed the good things in life. On the other, the idea of their name being used as a branding asset, to sell twenty-pound cocktails to people who could not name a single one of their books, would have struck them as precisely the kind of commercial vulgarity they defined themselves against. Virginia Woolf, one suspects, would have written something devastating and private about it in her diary. Lytton Strachey would have said something cruel and funny out loud. And Keynes would have ordered another drink and pointed out that the bar was, economically speaking, making entirely rational use of a valuable brand. The name as an asset This is the honest reading. "Bloomsbury" is now a global brand meaning refined, intellectual, tasteful, literary - and it is available to any business in the postcode to use, entirely free, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the Group at all. The publisher Bloomsbury, which published Harry Potter, uses it. Hotels use it. And this bar uses it, and the name does exactly what a name is supposed to do: it promises a certain refined, literary, tasteful evening, and it delivers a very good one. Verdict A genuinely lovely townhouse bar and garden with a strong score, trading on the name of a group of geniuses who would have found the trade both irritating and, in Keynes's case, entirely understandable. The garden The bar's real asset is its garden, and that is quietly appropriate, because the Bloomsbury Group were obsessed with gardens. Vanessa Bell's house at Charleston in Sussex, where much of the Group decamped, is as famous for its garden as for its painted rooms. A private garden in central London was, to them, one of the great luxuries of civilised life. So of all the ways to trade on their name, a beautiful garden bar is perhaps the least offensive - it offers a thing the Group genuinely loved, rather than merely borrowing their reputation for cleverness. They might even have forgiven it, over a drink, in the shade. Verdict A genuinely lovely townhouse bar and garden with a strong score, trading on the name of a group of geniuses who would have found the trade both irritating and, in Keynes's case, entirely understandable. Go, sit in the garden, have a cocktail, and raise it to Virginia Woolf, who would have hated that you were there and written brilliantly about why.

Tag: Bloomsbury Group

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