Curzon Mayfair
(Picture: Curzon Mayfair)London must save itself from winnowing out with tedious repetition: to be a place that people, not money, inhabit; to be a living city, not a cold-eyed investment opportunity, and beautiful too. This week it is the turn of the Curzon cinema in Mayfair to be threatened with expulsion. It is, without question, the most superb cinema in central London. I have spent many a rain-lashed night sheltering inside its gorgeous interiors. It’s one of the few places in Mayfair you can spend an evening for £20 unless you want to spend that on a coffee and cake inside the ludicrous Prada café on Mount Street. Though probably not for long.
Because avarice and individualism — a refusal to admit that your environment belongs to others too, surely an obvious thing when living in a city — are never-ending. In 2016, developers converting offices into flats above the Curzon complained that the soundproofing was inadequate. Who buys a flat above a cinema and complains about the noise of a cinema? The kind of people who live near the Compton Arms in Islington — one of London’s finest pubs, a model for George Orwell’s idealised pub The Moon Under Water — and took it to licence review? Lawyers on maternity leave?
