In honour of the New Year today's post is about renewal and transformation. This is what the Eaglet on the corner of Seven Sisters and Hornsey Road looks like now:
Those beautiful tiles are much younger than the building above. At the end of September 1917 the pub was hit by a Zeppelin raid. Two photographs (here and here) taken the day show the ground floor wrecked, with the glass and woodwork smashed and the beer barrels clattered down from their storage loft.
Even though it has a better story to tell than most, the Eaglet isn't a nostalgic pub. The landlords haven't decorated it with sepia photographs of the Hornsey Road, old theatre playbills, or First World War newspaper reports. There's a mural with an Elvis impersonator instead:
Where: 124 Seven Sisters Road.
The bomb-damaged pub reminds me of the opening scene of (I think) Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, where the narrator walks past just such a place. The odds are pretty low that it's the same one, I guess.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, Anthony Powell's fictional pub is the Mortimer, placed near Gerrard St in Soho, and was said to have been destroyed in the Second World War. But I stand by the reminiscence all the same.
ReplyDeleteThank you anyway. Now as I walk past the Eaglet I can think that it's not the pub in DTTMOT and life becomes a little less boring.
ReplyDeleteMy Great Grandfather was at the pub when this happened. The family lived on Hornsea Road. He was a French polisher and had been invalided out of the army after getting injured. His name was William John Forester Keating.
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