Italian without the heat or drama

Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love the Westway because it takes you away from Hammersmith. Even so, it possesses the River Café — it is not a café — a famous and influential Italian restaurant. It was ten when Tony Blair came to power, but inside it is as if he were still here, playing air guitar while chatting about PPP.

It is inaccessible, taunting its clientele to go to Hammersmith. It feels as if it takes more than an hour to get to the River Café from anywhere that is not Hammersmith. How do they get there — by helicopter? There is a heliport at Battersea but what then? The 295 bus, apparently, and then a short walk. Or you could go on the way to Heathrow airport, as recommended, in all seriousness, by a guidebook. You wouldn’t know you weren’t in an airline lounge. Or you could go by boat, if you are Cardinal Wolsey.

The River Café was founded by Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray. Ruth Rogers is married to Richard Rogers, the architect responsible for the Millennium Dome and, therefore, among other things, the creator of the Queen’s angriest ever public facial expression. To celebrate the River Café’s 30th birthday last year, Lady Rogers gave an interview in which she said: ‘I don’t get angry with people who don’t know what asparagus is’. Which I think means she does. To be rich and have a social conscience is a terrible fate. The lefties who loved her have gone. Her values dangle on a string.

Lord Rogers built this house. He took an oil storage facility called Duckhams — tall and brown, in brick — and made a ‘canteen’ for the architects in his nearby practice.