As good as Noble Rot: Cloth reviewed

Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson here and, for BBC1, jumped off the roof of the hospital. If Cloth calls itself a ‘neighbourhood wine bar’, which sounds less threatening than ‘restaurant’, its true customers are the dead, and that is no criticism.

I am early, so I sit in St Bartholomew the Less – this is how buildings fight! – and learn that Inigo Jones was baptised here, and that the warden – a chatty man – likes to play the wireless in the church, a pleasing eccentricity. ‘That’s the Police,’ he says, helpfully, when I say good night. Then I sit in the gaudy, brightly lit pub on the corner of Cloth Fair as a storm blows in. This is where I might complain about the absence of people in the City, but it adds to its charisma at night. Anything could happen. Of course, what will happen is that I will eat at Cloth and get the 46 bus to Hampstead. But it feels like I mightn’t, and that’s the alchemy of a good restaurant.

Cloth is the ground floor of a house that used to belong to John Betjeman – another plaque, they outnumber live residents – and now belongs to the Landmark Trust, who rent it to tourists who treat it like a shrine. If you don’t know the Landmark Trust, you should. They have a thatched castle in Dorset, which is unique even for English architecture: a self-hating fortress.