Chelsea has always had an upmarket ring to it, is down the road from Harrods and Hyde Park Corner and attracts an awful lot of wealthy foreigners including Americans on big salaries and generous expense accounts.
My Japanese friend’s wife wrote us a thank you letter after we had hosted a dinner party. She had drawn a table in the letter to present the following: ‘Happy life: Japanese wife, British house, American salary. Unhappy life: Japanese house, British salary, American wife’. I think she might have spelt ‘salary’, ‘saraly’.
Anyway, back to Chelsea. It used to be a nice mixture of posh and bohemian. Now it’s just posh. It’s gone the way of the Left Bank of Paris and Manhattan, now mainly the natural habitat of private equiteers (new word), hedge funders and tourists.
Apparently the word ‘Chelsea’ in Old English means ‘river landing place’. Chelsea has the Thames running along its southern border with many a nice house or flat overlooking the river. One of the those houses, 4 Cheyne Walk, is where George Eliot, one of my favourite nineteenth century authors, lived.
Back in my heyday, the 1970s, the term ‘Sloane Ranger’ was coined by Harpers & Queen to refer to posh girls with pearls and hoorah Henrys whose locus was Sloane Square and who hung out at ‘The Cod’ (Admiral Codrington pub) and later on, when Fulham got Chelsea-ised, the Sloaney Pony (White Horse pub in Parsons Green).
I seem to remember the White Horse when it was pre-Sloaney, it was your typical old-fashioned pub with no carpets or fancy food, just a dart board and a few antediluvian Scotch eggs in a glass cabinet (as if they were museum pieces). I went there circa 1980 with a French intellectual, Gerard-Georges, a prolific and erudite editor from Paris, who conducted a truly Parisian café society analysis of a Scotch egg thus: “Autour du noyau terrestre d’œuf dur au centre, la chair à saucisse est pressée à la main et le tout est trempé dans une pâte grésillante pour créer une balle de cricket comestible.” Far from denigrating the appalling state of British cuisine at the time, Gerard-Georges regarded the Scotch egg as a triumph of culinary engineering.
Now of course every pub in the land offers expensive gastronomy and in many ways Britain’s pubs and restaurants offer better fare than their counterparts in France. I could never have predicted that.
Famous Sloanes included Jemima Goldsmith, Diana, Princess of Wales, James Hewitt (one of her lovers), Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Sarah, Duchess of York.
I notice that even today the Chelsea tradition of upper class twits and chinless wonders continues with the popular TV show ‘Made in Chelsea’.
Other matters: do I have to talk about Chelsea football club? Maybe. I guess you either love, or hate Chelsea FC. For the former, enjoy your sing songs on the terraces of Stamford Bridge. Rephrase… they are not terraces of course, they are all-seater stadiums these days for middle class families who have the seven figure salaries enabling them to get tickets. One of the advantages of this new social phenomenon is that you don’t get confronted by groups of skinhead football hooligans wanting to kick you in because you happen to be wearing an Arsenal scarf (by accident). No, these days, it’s Cynthia and Jonty off to The Bridge in their Chelsea Tractor and a few hundred pounds later, quaffing some Bolly at the Pony.
Shall we think about art and stuff? Well, there’s the Chelsea College of Art, which was in Chelsea but is now next door to Tate Britain in Pimlico. In my day I am fairly sure it was in the King’s Road next to the fire station. Alumni include many successful artists including a number of the YBAs (Young British Artists). I am not good on contemporary or conceptual art these days as I now think art kinda stopped with the advent of photography. It sort of peaked in Greece around 400BC and has been on a downhill trajectory since. Also I’m not a big fan of art that has to be explained. I figure that if it has to be explained it can’t be very good. John Keats had the right idea: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’.
But, on the other hand, if you are really into the contemporary art thing, why not go and visit the Saatchi Gallery on the King’s Road? I notice the tickets are quite cheap. Have a look at some abstract paintings and then have a wander around the redeveloped Duke of York’s HQ. And while you are dangerously close to Sloane Square, the very epicentre of Sloanedom, you can pop into John Lewis (‘never knowingly undersold’), have a drink or a meal at one of the restaurants thereabouts, and even see a show at the Royal Court Theatre, which used to have a big reputation for great productions. Not sure what it’s like these days (let me know).
I should also mention the Chelsea Arts Club in Old Church Street. I am more of a pub than a club type but I must say that CAC is a very nice place to hang out, have a few drinks and maybe a meal, sit in the garden, recognise the odd old rocker, listen to a bit of trad Jazz on a Friday evening, etc. As it’s a club you need to be a member or a guest of a member. It’s quite famous and was set up in 1891 thanks to Whistler (as far as I am concerned, one of the very best artists of the period). You should recognise the building as it’s usually got very loud murals on its façade.
Final tip… if you fancy a quiet pint or dinner, try my favourite pub in Chelsea, the Cooper’s Arms in Flood Street. It’s not so touristy and not so posh, just a nice hangout in the middle of Chelsea.
