Colony Room Scenes: Peter Clark

Images from The Colony Room: Peter Clark

Peter Clarke

On first being led into Soho’s notorious Colony Room Club, the guest of a habituated member asked in dismay ‘What’s that smell?’ Without looking up, another member, stooped in a corner, muttered, ‘Failure’.  The old salt stared into his wine – just a sailor fathoming his mermaid. ‘Failure,’ he mumbled again more faintly, this time not joking but sinking.

Darren Coffield, artist, author and former member of the Colony Room Club, has re-created in significant detail the seedy first-floor bar. The once much-loved (but now sadly shut down) members’ club in bohemian Soho opened its doors in 1948, when lesbian mondaine Muriel Belcher paid the then unknown Francis Bacon £10 a week to fetch ‘interesting’ drinkers into its embrace. It was a speakeasy frequented by homosexuals, artists, prostitutes, writers, politicians and petty criminals. Its latest incarnation is as a work of installation art, occupying a basement just off Regents Street. How best might we think about such work?

Excerpt from:
Art’s Dividing Line: The Colony Room Club and Kant on this one from the heart by Edward Winters

Photos by Peter Clark
peterclarkimages.co.uk

Peter Clarke
Peter Clark
Peter Clarke
Peter Clark
Peter Clarke
Peter Clark
Peter Clarke
Peter Clark
Peter Clarke
Peter Clark

Ziggy Green opened at 4 Heddon Street on November 22, 2023. The Colony Room Club will be open on a walk-in basis only, from 3-11pm, seven days a week, and for a limited time only.

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