It’s the very hot summer of 1976. You have persuaded your Mum and Dad to let you listen to the car radio for once as we drive across town from west to east to visit a boring aunt. The windows of the Ford Cortina are down since we’re too early in UK history for proper air conditioning, thus letting the fumes of the London traffic into the vehicle. It’s nearly 90 degrees in Fahrenheit terms. Kenny Everett is on air playing the latest adventures of Captain Kremmen. Your parents don’t particularly like Cuddly Ken as he’s very zany and, to hear him above the din caused by the open car window, we’ve turned the radio up quite loud. But for once we’re not listening to boring Radio 2 on our way out to East Ham.
As the Marylebone Road is navigated, a trailer for ‘Little’ Nicky Horne comes on. He will be on later that Saturday evening with his show Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It. Kenny Everett is back after the trailer finishes and now plays some E.L.O.: ‘Living Thing’
Over there on the right is Great Portland Street station and you realise that the sound emanating from the radio is being broadcast from the building coming up on the left. “Mum!” you say. “Can you image that the person we are listening to playing this record is somewhere up there in that building?”
That building is Euston Tower and it’s where Capital Radio was based.
Two hundred years before, and just like in the mid 1970s, this was one of London’s premier venues for entertainment of all sorts.
The very site of Euston Tower was the very site of the Adam and Eve Tearooms.
The Adam and Eve Tearooms were in place by 1718 - recorded then but probably existing for nearly a century before that. They occupied the former manor house site at Tottenham Court Road's northern extremity before the road continued north as the ‘Highgate Road’ (later the ‘Hampstead Road’). The tearooms were located beside the turnpike's toll booth and business was significantly boosted for northbound travellers wanting a little break.
The New Road (now Marylebone Road/Euston Road) had not yet been thought of and the tearooms were situated on the corner of a small lane which led west to the Farthing Pye House. Now the ‘Greene Man’ beside Great Portland Street station, the Farthing Pie House earned its name by selling mutton pies for a farthing. In its early days, the tavern stood amidst rural surroundings and like the Adam and Eve tearooms not far to its east, it established pleasure gardens.
The Pye House had notable patrons, including artists William Blake and Richard Wilson, attracted to the musical acts or other pleasures.
There was a certain rivalry between the Pye House and the tea gardens, but it has to be said that the tea gardens had much better facilities and usually won the most customers.
There was a spacious hall with an organ, bowling facilities and sprawling gardens featuring tea-drinking arbours. Behind the gardens were tranquil orchards of uncultivated fruit trees.
William Hone, in his Yearbook (1832), remembered the Adam and Eve “with spacious gardens at the side and in the rear, a fore-court with large timber trees, and tables and benches for out-door customers.” He speaks of the bowers and arbours for tea-drinking parties in the garden. It may be this inn to which George Wither, in Britain’s Remembrancer (1628) refers when he speaks of people “resorting to Tottenham Court for cakes and cream”.
In 1745, William Hogarth dropped by and painted an imagined scene called the ‘March of the Guards to Finchley’.
This view north along today’s Tottenham Court Road would have the main foreground characters depicted standing roughly in the middle of the Euston underpass. The sign for the tearooms can be seen on the left. The Old Kings Head is on the right. In the distance are the hills of Hampstead and Highgate.
The party was on their way to the Finchley Camp as part of the journey to Scotland to meet the Jacobite Young Pretender, Charles Stuart.
The King’s Head was only demolished as late as 1906 to make way for the widening of the Hampstead Road at a notorious pinch point where the road narrowed.
On 13 May 1785 Vincenzo Lunardi, the balloonist, took off from the Honourable Artillery Company ground on his maiden flight and descended here at the tearooms within 20 minutes. So said a contemporary: “He was immediately surrounded by great numbers of the populace and though he proposed reascending they were not to be dissuaded from bearing him in triumph on their shoulders.”
Towards the end of the 18th century the gardens were starting to become hemmed in with houses as the urban area of Marylebone expanded into the later suburb of Fitzrovia. The tearooms started to be frequented by criminals and prostitutes.
A couple of decades went by when polite society would definitely not be seen at the Adam and Eve Tearooms.
In the early 19th century, because of all the lewd behaviour they were shut by the magistrates. They were reopened as a tavern in 1813. This tavern - still called The Adam and Eve, survived until Euston Tower went up on its site.