Christopher Howse's Nights and Days in Soho

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis: December 4, 2018]

Christopher Howse was there.  Not just in the 1980s, but through much of the 1990s too.  If I didn’t recall, as in fact I do, his tweedily bearded appearance, the granularity of detail in his memoir, Soho in the Eighties, would be immediately convincing. As soon as page 5, he is busy reconstructing the interior of the Coach & Horses pub, from the mysterious stone trough running along the punter’s side of the bar, to the dumb waiter hatch, and the “wobbly end” of the wooden rail to which drinkers often clung for support.

When he mentions the “niche behind the bar flap” providing “shelter for a book to be stowed out of harm from spillage,” I immediately see Stephen Pickles, publisher and one-off novelist (Queens, 1984), pushing a valuable old volume from the London Library into the narrow space.