Gargoyle Club

The upper floors of 69 Dean Street – now the Dean Street Townhouse – were, from 1925 to 1952, the Gargoyle Club: one of the most extraordinary rooms in London and the social centre of bohemian Soho for a generation. David Tennant founded it and commissioned Henri Matisse to design the interior – a glittering entrance staircase of steel and brass, a dance floor, log fires, Moorish lanterns, and a coffered ceiling of gold leaf. Two Matisse paintings hung in the bar; they are now in MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington. The opening membership included Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, and Virginia Woolf. Francis Bacon and Dylan Thomas drank here for decades. It was not a gay club – it was something rarer: a room where what you were did not define what you were allowed to be. Tennant sold it in 1952 for £5,000. It became a strip club. The room is gone. The building remains.