Literary Cafes, Pubs, and Taverns

While attending the University of London, a friend sublet a flat in Fitzrovia, right across from the Fitzroy Tavern, and, during a trans-Atlantic phone call, held the phone out the window for me to hear the Fitzroy's patrons at their leisure.

It was a moment feebly akin to celebrity-spotting at famous clubs and eateries - a moment probably appreciated most by those with a literary bent.

Fitzrovia is a small area in London bounded by Tottenham Court Rd., Oxford St., Euston Rd., and Great Poerland St. - and Bloomsbury and Soho.

Fitzrovia, Fitzroy St., Fitzroy Rd. (in nearby Regent's Park), Fitzroy Square housed, entertained, and nourished (gastronomically and intellectually) many literary elite, especially, but not only, in the years immediately following WWI - the height of English Modernism.

In no particular order - Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, W.B.Yeats, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas (pictured at left), Wyndham Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Anthony Burgess, Arthur Rimbaud, and Patrick Kavanagh. The area was also a favourite of Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, and, later, Sylvia Plath and Pink Floyd.

Fitzrovia represents for me a time when writers gathered frequently in pubs, restaurants, and cafes to discuss their work, but also to discuss writing, poetry, literaure, art, meaning, philosophy, the writer's life - a whole literary way of being in the world.

I feel a nostalgia for this time before my existence! To be sure, there are still poetry readings and writers meeting in public establishments, as well as a million or more internet sites with poetry, book reviews and literary forums.

But, love it or hate it, the Modernist period in England had a special flavour that we just don't or can no longer do. And Fitzrovia was right in the thick of it all.