There’s no better way to view Soho than from Jeffrey Bernard’s former council flat overlooking Berwick Street Market. For many, Bernard is remembered as a notorious writer and alcoholic – a close friend to many of the more famous artists, actors and personalities who inhabited ‘The Crooked Mile’. To produce this small film, we initially wrote to the occupiers of Bernard’s former flat out of the blue asking them to allow the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) to host an event in their front room. I have Estrella Bravo and her husband to thank for replying and inviting me over. Having been given the green light to proceed, we then contacted Guardian art critic Adrian Searle, a former acquaintance of Bruce Bernard, Jeffrey’s brother.
What you see here is a reading given by Searle of Jeffrey Bernard’s ‘Home, Sweet Home’ which first appeared in The Spectator magazine, 7 December 1991. The article compares the wonders of the world with the ‘rotting fruit and vegetables in Berwick Street Market’. The article first appeared in Bernard’s Low Life column, sitting next to the High Life column written by Taki. Imparting a vivid description of Soho as it was at the time, the article conjures one of the more lasting images of Berwick Street Market when it stood at the heart of a thriving community.
A small detail but Bernard’s former flat faces north, overlooking Oxford Street and the BT Tower, not south as described in ‘Home, Street Home’. Bernard’s track ‘from right to left’ ends with a view looking eastward toward Centrepoint, something that could only be achieved from a corner flat directly opposite his own. This led us to speculate whether Bernard was sitting in a friend’s flat, or whether the view is derived purely from his imagination. Either way neither the Swiss Centre (now gone), Odeon Leicester Square or St Anne’s Church could have been spied from 45 Kemp House, which, thanks to the attendance of Bernard’s daughter at the time of the reading, undoubtedly remains the writer’s former address.
Born in 1932, Jeffrey Bernard died in Kemp House in 1997, having returned from hospital to do so. Of himself in a spoof obituary (which he refers to in ‘Home Sweet Home’), he wrote: ‘In 1946 he paid his first visit to Soho and from that point he was never to look forward. It was here in the cafés and pubs of Dean Street and Old Compton Street that he was to develop his remarkable sloth, envy and self-pity.’
Gregor Muir is the executive director of the ICA. The Jeffrey Bernard reading was an ICA Off-Site project.
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