Café Royal & Oscar Wilde
Regent Street · where Wilde held court before the fall
Beneath the gilded ceilings of the Café Royal on Regent Street, Oscar Wilde dined, drank and held court with the young men of his circle through the early 1890s. The mirrored Domino Room was a stage for a coded, knowing sociability — wit as both pleasure and armour at a time when desire between men was a criminal offence.
It was here, and in the streets around it, that Wilde's world turned. The 1895 trials that followed his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry ended in two years' hard labour and cast a long shadow over queer London — a warning that visibility carried a terrible price.