I love it in the same way I’m drawn to the novels of Anita Brookner or EM Forster
Up two flights of what look like flophouse stairs, accessed via an easily missed entrance at the Aldwych end of The Strand, is a restaurant that has no business existing in the centre of one of the world’s most rapacious cities. A blackboard announcing Happy Hour in their “1940s lounge bar” has collapsed over a cracked lobby mosaic; I’m not sure if this is deliberate impediment or an omen.
Since 1946, The India Club has lived in the Hotel Strand Continental, an accommodation where you can rent four-person dorms “from £20 per bed per night”. Formerly a haunt of civil servants and diplomats from the nearby High Commission of India (including the Club’s founder, VK Krishna Menon), this unreconstructed canteen, with its mustard walls, wood-laminated tables and scab-coloured linoleum floors, was formerly a hotbed of political machination. Lugubrious oil paintings of Gandhi and Britain’s first Asian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, watch as we peel apart plastic-coated menu pages.
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