Nostalgia

In the course of a visit to St. Luke's yesterday, I indulged in a spot of nostalgia, if that is the right word, about the Market Restaurant in Whitecross Street, snapped above from Street View. 

I thought that I had been using the place for somewhere between 10 and 15 years, maybe averaging between 5 and 10 visits a year, with my order never changing: tea and bacon sandwich on crusty white. This last telling the cook to use thick sliced white rather than thin sliced white. Always inside. Which is longer than I have been doing most things. The same chap has been running the place all this time, I think from Turkey, known to take a fag outside from time to time, although the waitresses (just the odd waiter) generally turn over fairly quickly, lasting maybe a year or so.

Clientèle mainly blue collar, with sprinklings of residents, grey hairs and white collars.

In other parts of the street, there used to be a very busy street food scene, but while still present, this has not yet recovered from the interruption of the plague years. Too many of the bright young things who work the Old Street area have got used to not coming in on Thursday and Fridays, these being the days for St. Luke's.

Checking the archive this morning, in particular with the query at reference 1, suggests that I have been using the Market Restaurant since early 2012, which makes it eleven years, and using St. Luke's for a bit longer, maybe twelve years. A long-time source of cheap lunch time concerts sponsored by Radio 3, now somewhat diminished, presumably because of the Tories bearing down on the public grants for the private cultural activities of posh people who should be able to pay their own way.

In the beginning BH came few times, but we failed to discover the quick route via Balham and the Northern Line, and she found the journey a bit tiresome. I may have walked from Waterloo in the beginning, having walked up Farringdon Road to Bowling Green Road for meetings in a very modest Schlumberger office there during my days with the Home Office. But fairly early on, I discovered Bullingdons, which cut the journey from Waterloo to St. Luke's down from something like an hour to something like a quarter of an hour.

There was also a phase of taking sandwiches to eat in the churchyard before concerts - chopped egg on white or mashed sardines on brown - but it looks as if this had largely given way to bacon sandwiches from Whitecross Street by 2012. 

I remember that, for a while, the seat we used to use was used in-between times by a cigar smoker, as quite posh looking butts were often to be seen in the flower bed behind.

Then was the rather scruffy charity shop near the St. Luke's end of Whitecross Street, for a while a good source of both DVDs and books. Not used presently on the grounds that it is a bit musty and likely home for too many unwanted bugs.

The only other once-regular haunt that I can think of being the Wetherspoon's, 'The Masque Haunt', on the way to Old Street tube station.

References

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=bacon+whitecross.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/03/leysian-mission.html. This appears to be notice of the very first visit to St. Luke's.

Reference 3: https://www.jdwetherspoon.com/pubs/all-pubs/england/london/the-masque-haunt-old-street. 'In Elizabethan times, the nearby gatehouse of the former Priory of St John served as the office of the Master of the Revels, who was responsible for licensing plays, masques and other entertainment for the queen. A masque was a lavish drama with music and dancing, written by the leading poets and playwrights of the day. It was performed by masked figures and had an unusual name, like the masked haunt'. The Wetherspoon's branding people are good on heritage angles!