Bride of Denmark - English pub

Architectural Review, The, May, 1996

For decades, the Bride of Denmark, the private pub of the Architectural Review, was the best place to drink in London and the focus of architectural gossip and plots.

As Frank Duffy remarked when he was President of the RIBA, the Bride of Denmark in Queen Anne's Gate 'was a hard place to get into, but even more difficult to get out of'. To be invited to the private pub that the AP had in the cellars of its five 1775 houses was an honour. You knew you had arrived on the London scene (even if in a very small way) if you were invited downstairs to the dark brown underworld which Hubert de Cronin Hastings and his chums(1) had created after the War fearing that the English pub would disappear.

The Bride(2) was created out of the fragments of bombed and redeveloped pubs as a collage intended to maximise variety of every kind. The AR's mixture of hard-line Modernism, the Picturesque, love of tradition and surprise, Englishness and the exotic was conflated there. Its built stories raggled over each other, interweaving, and suddenly bursting out when you least expected them. Its intensity of messages prefigured post-modern sensibility (not PoMo) at its most complex: Le Corbusier had cut his signature into the mirror next to you with a diamond stylus that had been similarly used by Kahn and Wright and many others. A lion peered from its lair;(3) there were cases of stuffed fish, a turtle shell, rows of dusty bottles (their contents drunk long ago by the ancestral editors), the reputed fruit of the tree of good and evil; vistas were cut short, views made longer and deflected sideways by multiple reflections full of incident, sparkle and brilliance. John Piper had painted that ceiling; H. de C. had encouraged a gang of small boys with chains to distress the wall over there.

Hard-line Modernists like Cedric Price and Peter Smithson always rather despised the Bride as an old whore. The comfort, and the eccentricity (elegant as it was), put off such sternly dedicated men. But if you had been a rather long-lived rat down in those cellars, you could have heard all the best architectural arguments and scurrilous gossip, seen all the most interesting people and witnessed countless extraordinary occasions. Alas no more: the cellars are empty and the Bride's collections are now in boxes, hoping for a new home. P.D.

1 Hastings was the active member of one of the two families that owned the firm (p102): the friends with whom he made the place were said to include Hugh Casson, Nikolaus Pevsner, James Richards, Osbert Lancaster, John Piper. (We can't be sure exactly who was involved because most of the AR's papers have been destroyed or stolen by previous owners.)

2 So called because Queen Anne (of Queen Anne's Gate) was the wife of the entirely forgotten Danish Prince George.

3 This was said to be one of Pevsner's only visual jokes. During his research for Buildings of England, he visited one of Lord Moyne's mansions, and found that the then holder of the Guinness title had sent his father's sporting trophies to the stables, where leaks in the roof had damaged the stuffed beasts. But Pevsner knew what to do with the front end of a lion.