Serious about its whimsy: Sessions Arts Club reviewed

The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where the criminals of Middlesex were once judged in splendour. It’s common for fine once-public buildings to become private buildings now: the old War Office on Whitehall will be, come summer, Raffles at the OWO. The acronym is not mine – it never is – and I doubt you could run a war from there, though you could try. You could throw a mojito at a laptop. I wonder if there is a connection between the ugliness of the new public buildings and the state of our public discourse: what is there to be proud of but rage?

Yet for every mogul who wants to privatise the government, and every would-be tyrant soothing himself by maiming others, there is a place to hide from their opinions, and the Arts Club is one such, if you can afford it. (It’s £60 a head or thereabouts.) For once the copywriting, which I usually tut at, is accurate: ‘an urban sanctuary’. It claims children cannot be admitted due to the building’s listed status (II*), which I think will be news to the Tower of London (I). If you don’t want children, say so. There is no need to invoke bogus regulations. Even so, it is delicate food delivered with grace and aptitude, and it knows it, and it is necessary to book in advance.

Clerkenwell is an interesting district, the Borough of the north, and what is most interesting – this is common in London – is under your feet. You can ride the old Royal Mail train, which delivered letters across London, and is not yet a branch of the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express, being tiny.