Brief Encounter
Named for suppressed passion, opened in freer times
Brief Encounter – named after the Noël Coward film – was a gay bar in the basement of the St Martin’s Hotel, tucked between the Coliseum and the theatre district. It was named perfectly: this was the street of theatres, and its clientele made brief encounters with their own freedom in the intervals.
The name, borrowed from Coward’s film of suppressed passion and impossible love, carried a deliberate irony: by the time the bar opened in the 1980s, the suppression was no longer necessary. In the film, two people in a railway station cannot say what they feel, cannot stay and cannot leave. By the 1980s the people who drank here didn’t need to catch the train. It closed in 2008; the building is still a hotel.