You’re spoiling us: The Ambassadors Clubhouse reviewed

The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting. There was an avant-garde café under the Heddon Street Kitchen called The Cave of the Golden Calf. Ziggy Stardust was photographed for his album cover outside No. 23; from Heddon Street you could hear the Beatles play their final concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969.

But that is over. Heddon Street now has the awful sheen of the gormless tourist London which Richard Curtis invented, entirely unconsciously. It is still Victorian, but the brickwork is over-pointed, and the windows over-washed. It could be Diagon Alley at the Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden, or the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.