The Tavistock, 41 Tavistock Crescent, W11

A little bit of Camden Town in Notting Hill. Withnail & I seems to be quintessential Camden, yet hardly any of it was filmed there. Notting Hill landmarks such as Trellick Tower and the Westway Flyover, roaring behind the ‘Mother Black Cap’ are an indication that maybe we’re not in NW1 anymore.

The Tavistock , facing the end of St Luke’s Road, has had a radical makeover since its fame in the movies. It’s hard to believe that this stylish restaurant was Camden’s woozy old Irish boozer where, in 1987, Withnail (Richard E Grant) ordered “Two large gins. Two pints of cider. Ice in the cider”.

For a while the bar was lumbered with the laddish name of Fudrucker’s, then it became part of the trendy Russian chain Babushka, before becoming – briefly – The Mother Black Cap, then Crescent House. As Babushka, it’s glimpsed briefly near the opening of 1999 sex-swap comedy Virtual Sexuality.

Trivia: the name of the ‘Mother Black Cap’ is a conflation of two famous real Camden bars: the Black Cap, one of the capital’s longest-established gay bars, and the Mother Red Cap, a huge old pub since reinvented as the World’s End with, beneath it, music venue Underworld.

Withnail & I (1987, dir: Bruce Robinson)
Virtual Sexuality (1999, dir: Nick Hurran)