There Are Doors (7)

Located in Newman Passage, a narrow dogleg between Newman Street and Rathbone Street in Fitzrovia, this door has been much spruced up since a prostitute led Carl Boehm’s murderous photographer through it at the beginning of Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom.

It leads now into the Newman Arms pub, which connects us back to the previous entry in this erratic little series, for during the war George Orwell used to drink here while working for the BBC. Back then, the pub didn’t have a spirits license so it served only beer; Orwell used it as the model for the pub in 1984 where Winston Smith tries and fails to learn about life before the Revolution from an old prole. And as mentioned before, my friend Kim Newman’s grandmother typed up the manuscript of 1984 . . .