What a greasy spoon in West London tells us about the threat of nuclear war

All-day diners feasting on the full English, the cheese omelette or the celebrated sausage sandwich (£3.80) at George’s Café, at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, probably don’t realise they are dining at an address which is pivotal in global cultural history. So pivotal, in fact, that it might just tell us whether human civilisation is about to be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust.

A claim like that needs fleshing out. Here it is. Some 120 years ago, 36 Blythe Road was living a very different life to that of a humdrum suburban greasy spoon: it was the headquarters and archival nerve centre of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a fin de siècle mystical cult / sect / Kabbalistic Groucho Club, founded in 1888 by William Woodman, William Westcott and Samuel MacGregor Mathers. The sect was conceived after Mathers supposedly acquired a remarkable cache of ancient, occult ‘cipher documents’ – handed over by Hungarian Rosicrucians.