The last days of the Hand & Racquet

ONE day, in a time we might not be able to imagine right now, they will invent new building materials and the way everything looks will evolve again.

At that point, who is to say people won’t walk through the shiny glass buildings we’ve seen constructed in London over the past few years and deliver a plea for them not to be demolished?

“This gorgeous frame dates back to 2020 – it’s a classic example of a glass office building, and you can smell the history in every corner,” the heritage enthusiasts will tell the robot planning officials of the year 2080.

Possibly.

It’s actually hard to think anybody will feel nostalgic in the same way we can feel sorrow for the destruction of a 19th-century pub.

The Londoner Hotel

If you walk down Whitcomb Street near Leicester Square you wouldn’t know a delightful drinking den called the Hand & Racquet once stood here.

No doubt guests at The Londoner, with its cliff face of blue glass and reassuringly expensive £650-per-night rooms, have a grand time booking in to the 16-storey chi-chi complex of everything that came next. They’ll be able to see the queue for the all-night Greggs up there.

But if Harrington had a magic wand he would reinstate the old pub – with its history traced back to at least 1865 but maybe further – for one last jar.

A leap in a time machine might find us raising a glass with some of the funniest punters any pub could have ever wished for.

Tony Hancock

Tommy Cooper, Sid James and Tony Hancock were all among the clientele in its heydey.
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who wrote lines for Hancock, even featured the Hand & Racquet in some of their scripts.

In the building’s final years, before its death by bulldozer, it was boarded up and looked a sorry state. The walls had seen so much, but the beer had stopped pouring.

Its last regulars blamed the competition from pubs that looked more like airport lounges around Leicester Square – which had the aim of getting as many people in as possible. No nooks and crannies, no unexpected encounters.

People will say “that’s business” and the shut pub could not stand there crumbling away.

Maybe so, but some of us do miss the way the back streets of Westminster looked before each corner was systematically redeveloped to allow for a monolith.

But, of course, less money would have been made converting the Hand & Racquet into a new use while keeping the historic façade.