Serious about its whimsy: Sessions Arts Club reviewed

The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where the criminals of Middlesex were once judged in splendour. It’s common for fine once-public buildings to become private buildings now: the old War Office on Whitehall will be, come summer, Raffles at the OWO. The acronym is not mine – it never is – and I doubt you could run a war from there, though you could try. You could throw a mojito at a laptop. I wonder if there is a connection between the ugliness of the new public buildings and the state of our public discourse: what is there to be proud of but rage?

Yet for every mogul who wants to privatise the government, and every would-be tyrant soothing himself by maiming others, there is a place to hide from their opinions, and the Arts Club is one such, if you can afford it.