The perfect restaurant for the Labour party: Arcade reviewed

I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous person sees the world anew each day. I thought Arcade, a glass restaurant on New Oxford Street, which somehow manages to be worse than old Oxford Street, might have some of the drama of the arcade of my dreams. I thought it might be eerie, even arcane. Names are important. This one lied.

It is new, of course. This piece of the city, once Gin Lane, seems guiltier than most parts of London – it gives even Mitre Square a race in spectral squalor – and so is constantly building, tearing and rebuilding, in some appalling yet righteous act of civic self-hatred. There are fine old streets around – Denmark Street hangs on with its twinkling guitars and its terrible memories, and the Harmony Adult Store winks from under a preening witch’s house – but newer developments are basically the West End’s response to Blade Runner, with an uglier cast.