As good as Noble Rot: Cloth reviewed

Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson here and, for BBC1, jumped off the roof of the hospital. If Cloth calls itself a ‘neighbourhood wine bar’, which sounds less threatening than ‘restaurant’, its true customers are the dead, and that is no criticism.

I am early, so I sit in St Bartholomew the Less – this is how buildings fight! – and learn that Inigo Jones was baptised here, and that the warden – a chatty man – likes to play the wireless in the church, a pleasing eccentricity.