Cool and underground

The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the grand cafés of St James’s and Mayfair, which are raging exhibitionists with banquettes splayed like limbs. It is secretive and it knows, consciously or not, the tricks of children’s literature: the looking-glass, the wardrobe and the door. It is an 18th-century basement transformed, by magical whimsy, into a restaurant. To visit the loo is a quest for which you need a Gandalf, a hobbit and a lamp.

Burlington House looks like an English mansion that stared at Palladio, had a panic attack and exploded. It is clever-clogs land, home to a pile-up of learned societies, which I hope are ever at war, paintbrush against rock: the Geological Society of London; the Linnean Society of London; the Royal Astronomical Society; the Society of Antiquaries of London; the Royal Academy of Arts; the Royal Society of Chemistry. It reminds me of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem — which houses so many battling Christian sects that the key was given to a Muslim, for safety — but with jumpers. Intellectuals -loiter in their disarming and shockingly unfashionable clothes.

I understand why the clever clogs cling to Burlington House, even if the government once dreamed of evicting them and renting their rooms to — who knows? — Nestlé. There are few gaudy mansions on Piccadilly now: just Cambridge House, which is shuttered, and the Albany, a rest home for male slags (or ‘swordsmen’, as my colleague Taki might call them), and this. In London, everyone is a postcode snob including Dracula who, as I always remind people, lived — ish — at no. 347, which does not exist. If it did, it would now be a fashion concession, probably Pringle.