The average commuting Londoner spends up to 75 minutes a day on the Tube. Convincing one to get back on the Underground for dinner would probably seem like a terrible idea, but we’re not talking about a late night bacon butty and a bag of crisps to chomp on the last train home. No, we’re talking about a six-course Latin-inspired tasting menu and an entirely unique dining experience served up inside a decommissioned 1967 Victoria Line tube carriage stationed at the Walthamstow Pumphouse Museum.
Welcome to the Basement Gallery’s Underground Supper Club. It once began as a small supper club in a Brixton flat but “upgraded” for a slightly more unique setting two years ago when the founders stumbled across a decommissioned 1967 London tube carriage on a filming location website.
In a tiny disused café on a former Victorian waste pumping station where Cordon Bleu trained chef Alex Cooper produces his gourmet four-course meals and sends them out to the old underground carriage decked out in white table cloths and fine silverware, surrounded by other disused relics of London transport on the lot, an unlikely Underground Supper Club was born.
If you’ve ever ridden the London Underground before, it may take a little getting used to seeing people actually talking to each other on the Tube, let alone drinking glasses of wine or enjoying Cuban shredded brisket. But in case you need one, here’s a fitting conversation starter: the oddly comforting allure of London’s vintage tube textiles (the very ones you’ll be sitting on). Did you know that a woman designed many of the most iconic patterns for the city’s public transport, and that she was a distant cousin of Karl Marx? Her name was Enid Marx, and in 1937 she was selected to design the moquette seat fabrics for the London bus and tube seats and find patterns that could hide wear and dirt, but also avoid the “dazzle” problem – the potentially nauseating effects of a pattern in motion.
These versatile and often overlooked textiles have long accompanied generations of Londoners around the city on one of the oldest subway systems in the world. They can evoke all sorts of emotion and nostalgia, triggering fond memories of journeys made around London over the years. Chances are, the ones you make while dining aboard a 1960s Tube carriage will likely be among the most memorable.
If you’re interested, put the Basement Gallery’s Supper Club on your radar now to make sure you get a seat.(Walthamstow Pumphouse Museum, South Access Road, London E17; Thursday-Saturday dinners 7pm-9.30pm; £67 per person, prepaid reservations only for parties of 2 to 12; Supperclub.tube).
Oh, and in the meantime, there’s another “London Undeground” experience that might interest you …
Cahoots is no ordinary vintage-themed speakeasy. Inside a veritable decommissioned underground Tube station that was once used as a WWII shelter, Soho’s time travelling experience comes with cocktails and live jazz, but it also comes with a full-sized replica 1940s tube carriage where you’ll sip period-accurate drinks from rationing tins and milk bottles, looking out of the windows onto Northbound and Southbound train platforms, complete with vintage advertising posters on the walls. So much thought and detail has gone into bringing the abandoned Kingly Court station back to life, Hollywood’s best set decorators would be floored. And don’t assume it’s all just props and vintage replicas. When the disused station was discovered, a bunch of bric-a-brac was found and salvaged by the Cahoots creative team; crockery, furniture, lampshades and children’s toys that had been dragged in by sheltering wartime Londoners to make their shelter feel more like home.
Over the years, Cahoots has been slowly reviving the entirety of the station, from the previously mentioned underground train area (accessible by an old wooden escalator) to the old ground-level ticket hall for drop-in cocktails and most-recently, the cavernous signal station (the old control room) still covered in old switchboards, offering ideal acoustics for the live band that plays there every Friday and Saturday evening until the early hours.
You can also catch live jazz and swing performances in the underground station area on Sunday evenings from 8.30pm to 11.30pm. Tables can be reserved online for all three areas, each offering unique, memorable experiences and reasons to come back again and again.
(13 Kingly Court, Soho, W1B; +44 20 7352 6200; Mon -Wed 4pm-1am, Thurs 3pm-1am, Fri 3pm-2am, Sat 1pm-2am, Sun 4pm-midnight; private hire available; Cahoots London.)
