Tanya Gold reviews Attendant, London

I love metaphor, and now metaphor has led me to a toilet near Goodge Street, in that thankless patch of London idiots call No-Ho. Because this is not a toilet any more; it’s an espresso bar that used to be a toilet, and it is called Attendant, and it was in the Daily Mail, because the Daily Mail, while seemingly robust, is easily frightened by things that seem strange, and crack the curve of its happy universe. I am here with an architectural historian, which is good, because I can now imagine him six inches high, and declaiming, like Nikolaus Pevsner, from the toilet bowl — by far the best visual obituary for humanity I can think of. He thinks Attendant has ‘lovely detail’ but, first, the entrance.

The entrance to Attendant is marvellous, a weird squelch of insane late Victoriana and Batman and Doctor Who and and all the bad TV that drugs you into thinking the world is much more interesting than it first appears; there are secret worlds below John Lewis, beyond House of Fraser, behind Debenhams. It is a black gazebo full of holes, with a treacherous staircase down from Foley Street, made slightly less sinister (and actionable) with rope. Inside, as in a foul, monetised fairytale — Hampstead.

OK, it isn’t Hampstead. That, too, is metaphor. The word is code, for any north Londoner, for fine cake. Because Hampstead, evil as it is with its evil babies and evil mothers and evil adulterous fathers in their evil double-breasted cardigans, does fine cake. And here in Attendant there are many cakes, and absolutely no Starbucks hags, just a pair of estate agents fretting over floorplans.

The detail, as the Pevsner junkie says, is wonderful. It is bad news for modern architecture that a former toilet is more lovely than anything the Candy Brothers could build, or even imagine, but there it is.