Sandra Esquilant & The Golden Heart

Should you find yourself navigating the cholesterol-thick arteries of Spitalfields — that peculiar postcode where a Georgian townhouse stands cheek-by-jowl with a chicken shop of almost aggressive mediocrity — you would do well to genuflect before The Golden Heart, that corner boozer at Hanbury Street and Commercial Street  over which Sandra Esquilant has presided for more than forty years , a tenure that makes the reign of Queen Victoria look like a gap year.

Sandra — hula-hoop champion and spiritual mother of the community  — is one of those magnificent, vanishing creatures that London’s relentless appetite for artisanal flat whites and boutique gin bars is slowly, grimly consuming; her clientele has ranged, without apparent contradiction, from dock workers and nuns to Kate Moss and Pete Doherty , a social breadth that the Tate Modern can only dream of achieving with its dreary conceptual installations.

Art Review magazine, in a rare moment of institutional perspicacity, voted her one of the hundred most influential figures in the art world  — which is to say, she has done more for British culture pulling pints at six in the morning than the entire Arts Council has managed with its bottomless budget. The pub, one notes, features a neon tribute to her thirty-year marriage to Dennis and original Tracey Emin creations on the walls  — gifts from artists who could not afford to pay their tab, one suspects, and whose works are now worth considerably more than the rounds Sandra stood them. She is, in short, the last great landlady of the East End: warm, eccentric, irreplaceable, and absolutely wasted on the rest of us.