Marylebone in general has always been quite nice, run-down posh until 10-15 years ago when it started to improve again, it always had a faintly Parisienne feel to it, aided by an overspill of French refugees that were better heeled than the Soho set but not quite up the standard of their wealthier cousins to the west in Kensington/Belgravia. There used to be some fantastic cafes and restaurants in the area, mostly pushed out now by rising rates and rents but one or two hang on still. Chiltern St was never much on my radar until JS moved there but it holds a certain appeal - I quite like Trunk as a shop, Monocle cafe is a new one to me but I remember the old Monocle magazine shop over toward Goodge St (Charlotte St maybe?) reasonably well. I like Marylebone, it’s the kind of area I’d quite like to live if I were ever to return to London.

There is still Paul Rothe for soup and Liptauer sandwiches in Marylebone Lane. Old school Formica caff at the Southern end is gone, along with the ironmongers and the shop that only sold buttons, The Button Queen (relocated to Pembrokeshire)

There is a decent pub - The Golden Eagle - with a piano player and people singing along and a pricey but reasonable fish and chip shop.

I loved London, and Soho particularly back in my late teens/early twenties. Record shops, Textile King, gigs, clubs. I'd be up there three or four times a week sometimes. This was back when you had to dodge all the fallen fruit and veg. And not get caught gazing through certain shop windows.

Even my first rented studio flat was chosen for it's proximity to the train station so I could be at Waterloo in half an hour. I knew I'd cracked it when I could navigate the underground without looking up to check the maps.

I stopped going for whatever reason. Last year we took the boy there for a Mon - Fri break and I just didn't have the same feeling about it. Couldn't get any enthusiasm for the town at all.

I think it's similar to the mentality people have towards reunions. They want to show off how much they've changed to a load of people they expect to have stayed the same.

You go back to an area you loved or lived in and expect it to be the same. Of course it has moved on without you. Or never was how you remember it. Very George Orwell's Coming Up For Air.

Soho had a great shop that sold reprints of movie posters upstairs. Stills postcards in racks from A-Z that you'd flick through. The basement had piles of music papers and magazines. The only order would be; Pile of NME's over there. Pile of The Face over there. You had to sit on the floor and move one pile to another spot one by one to find what might have a piece you wanted to buy. Pre internet it was good to find and bring home an old, long forgotten Zig Zag interview or a still from Blow Up for your bedroom wall.

Now you sit at home online, use the search bar and click 'buy now'. No soul at all.

Alvey - you have mentioned Ruebens Deli in Baker St a couple of times so I decided to call in today only to find the shutters down and no sign of activity. This article mentions that it changed hands a couple of years ago:

https://london.eater.com/2019/8/20/20813479/reubens-kosher-restaurant-deli-central-london-rescue

I’m not sure if it has closed again.  I have read a number of reviews on Trip Advisor about the food, service and hygiene since the change of ownership that are pretty damning, so I feel I may nave had a lucky escape.

Thanks Alvey, perhaps I will.

Change is constant and never more so in great cities like London and New York. Over the years on FNB posters have often bemoaned the disappearance of beloved shops and businesses, mopped up by the spread of chains and big capital inflows. Creeping gentrification swallows up neighbourhoods, erasing their character, pricing residents out and displacing them into the suburbs, in turn bringing about unwelcome changes in those areas. It’s all part of the development of cities of course and quite fascinating, apart from when you don’t like the changes. If you’re interested in the development of London I can recommend a book called’ Metroburbia’ by Paul Knox which describes how London grew from an urban core surrounded by a collection of villages to the sprawling city of today. Knox also wrote one called ‘Metroburbia USA’ but that doesn’t concentrate so much on one area area and is more broadbrush and academic in style.

Duloux - ‘ Don't feel much nostalgia, but I do like to go back to places I've known and see how they've changed and stayed the same. I thought the town and country of my youth were permanent. How wrong I was. The weather is consistently the same when I visit, exactly how I remember it and the dampness too that lingers for most the year.’

Sounds very similar to the seaside area where I grew up in the West of England. Now subject to big population growth as people move in from less attractive and more expensive parts of the UK, keen to ‘escape to the country’. But for many the reality of their rural dream is a depressed place with little commercial activity and life on a soulless housing estate, far from any shops or amenities.

Last edited by FlatSixC (2022-09-28 02:48:33)

Blimey Alvey. I can't imagine anything worse than shopping being a family event! I'd spend half the time being pulled away by an eight year old and half the time sitting outside the changing rooms in Matalan. Far better as a solo pursuit for me.

You're right about the eighties though. The further we get away from that decade the more it looks like a particularly unpleasent time. People moan about kids spending all their time indoors staring at screens now as though the alternative is climbing trees and making camps. The reality always was that they were hanging around town centres and playgrounds for a good old smoke and spit.

''My daughter would wait patiently for me in John Simons now at 15 she is disparate to get into Monocle cafe and then onto Brandy Melville.''

Enjoy that, as my eldest is the head union convenor of the shoplifters of the world unite and takeover cooperative.