Favourite Places, The Westbourne

Notting Hill, London

Leica M3, Summicron 35mm F2 FP4 (400)

The Westy (Notting Hill, September ‘26)

The Westbourne is the kind of pub that makes you briefly believe you have your life in order. I arrived, as per, on a mild evening to find the terrace out front packed with people so glossy and relaxed that I assumed they had been issued the look by some government body. Each held a drink with the easy confidence of someone who had never once lost a car key down a drain. I found a small spot at the edge, next to a patio heater working valiantly to warm the entire western half of London, and ordered a pint. For a golden quarter of an hour I felt like one of them, which lasted right up until I sat on my own sunglasses.

Inside, the place is a marvel of light and noise. Enormous windows pour daylight onto a long bar, and the bar publishes menus with the air of an establishment that knows that whatever you choose, you have chosen well. What actually arrived was a Sunday roast of such heft and goodness that I ate it the way I have eaten every good meal in my life: too fast, while making small involuntary noises, and with a faint surprise at the end that it was gone. I then sank into a Chesterfield so deep and yielding that I began to wonder whether I would ever be retrieved, or whether a future landlord would one day find me there, still clutching a wine glass, like a cautionary exhibit.

 It was from this position of helpless comfort that I began to study the walls, and I realised with a jolt that I was sitting in a better gallery than several I have paid money to enter. Every spare inch is hung with art, and it is genuinely good: bold, arresting, and hung with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what they are doing and has no intention of explaining it to you. There are no little cards telling you what to think, no attendants hovering to stop you getting too close, and nobody minds if you examine a painting with a roast potato on your fork. I spent a happy half hour moving my gaze from one wall to the next, in the manner of an art critic, or at least of a man trying to look like one. By my third glass I had settled on a piece near the bar as the finest work in West London. It is a verdict I stand by, although I will concede that by then I was in no fit state to be trusted with anything much more demanding than a crisp.