For 60 years, in a green room up a dingy staircase in Dean Street, a steady flow of painters, poets and aristos would gather to drink by the bucket load, titter over scandals and welcome one another with the choice greeting of its proprietor: “Hello, c**ty!”.
Brewing an “atmosphere of delectable depravity” from the Colony Room’s opening in 1948, the likes of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, EM Forster, Tom Baker, Kate Moss, Christine Keeler, Damien Hirst, Will Self, Dylan Thomas, Tracey Emin, Lisa Stansfield and endless others would entrench this private members’ club like no other in Soho’s cultural history, spawning artworks and riotous tales aplenty.
