A culinary wasteland

The Allis is a restaurant inside the new Soho House at White City — it is called White City House — and it is every bit as ghastly as it sounds. I do not really object to Soho House’s attempt to colonise the entire planet and furnish it with purple velvet armchairs, which are now being replicated in people’s homes, leaving us in a sort of velvet fun palace you cannot escape, while silently crying. It also feels like a poor model for capitalism, even late capitalism. I quite like the one in Dean Street — if you can ignore the people, that is, which you can because they don’t lift their eyes from their MacBooks to your hideous face. But the BBC HQ in White City — shabby and charismatic, like a half-eaten brick doughnut — is not an abandoned warehouse to be pounced on with wallpaper and silks and repopulated by adults who like ball-pits. It was an important part of post-war British cultural history — I delivered my letter to Jim’ll Fix It here in 1983, and smirked at David Cameron when he was in opposition, before he became David Cameron, here — and my God, it — and even he — deserved better than this.

It was ever a wasteland. It still is. But it used to be a nicer wasteland. It used to have self-awareness; it knew how awful it was, and that made it loveable. And so, in the hierarchy of wastelands — and this column will soon visit Battersea Power Station and its restaurants, or ‘outlets’ to review another wasteland, ideally the wasteland’s wasteland — it has fallen. It has been cleaned up. The courtyard is shiny, tidy, a rebuke. Where are the badly dressed social democrats? There are shivering young trees and glinting new windows.