Go by the sheeting rain and it could have been a miserably dreich afternoon in April; look at a calendar and it was a nothing weekday in early November. But if you happened to walk through the doors of The Devonshire last Wednesday lunchtime, then the precise feeling, through a mysterious quirk of space and time, was of stepping into some unholy, simultaneous combination of St Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve and the last mobbed Friday night before Christmas.
Every corner of this white-hot, Soho megapub’s soft-lit, wood-panelled interior heaved with guffawing crowds of office workers and home counties theatregoers doomed to miss the start of the Moulin Rouge matinee; massed regiments of Guinness swirled and settled on the bar as former Guinea Grill landlord Oisin Rogers, one component of the supergroup of co-founders responsible for the place, frowned beside an overworked restaurant bookings laptop that might as well have been emanating smoke (next available reservation: late January at a push); later, amid the scrum of pint-hefting bodies and sodden jackets, there was the faintly Hogarthian sight of a squalling baby in a pram.
