On Gordon's beneath Villiers Street, and the logic of staying underground
Gordon's Wine Bar has been in the vaulted cellars beneath Villiers Street since 1890. The ceiling is perpetually damp. The lighting is candles. The correct order is sherry.
Gordon's Wine Bar has been in the vaulted cellars beneath Villiers Street since 1890 — which places it before both world wars, before the Festival of Britain, before every subsequent version of the city that has been built above it. The entrance is a narrow wooden door at pavement level, easy to miss and not labelled in any way that suggests you are welcome to enter. You are welcome to enter.
The stairs descend steeply. The ceiling of the main room is vaulted brick, and it is perpetually damp in the way that Victorian underground structures are: not water dripping, simply moisture in the air, the smell of stone and old wine that never entirely leaves. The walls are covered in newspaper cuttings and photographs mounted without system or apparent curation, yellowed to the point where dates are illegible. The wooden partitions that divide the space into alcoves are the same partitions that have always been there. The candles are pressed into wine bottles.
The correct order is sherry or port, both served by the glass from bottles that stand on the bar in the specific arrangement of a place that has been serving sherry and port for long enough that the arrangement has become institutional. There is a wine list, and it is reasonable. There is a cheese and charcuterie menu. But Gordon's operates on the logic of the house speciality: you come for the sherry, you come for the vaults, you come for the specific atmosphere that is not available above ground.
The terrace on Embankment Gardens is available in summer — a good terrace, with the gardens behind it and the river visible if you stand. But the terrace is the accommodation for the season; the vaults are the argument. London has very few spaces that have remained this structurally unchanged over such a duration. The renovation instinct has not reached here, or has been resisted. Either way, the result is a room that operates in a different century from the Charing Cross Road fifty metres east.
Arrive before the post-work crowd if you prefer to choose your alcove. After six the space fills with Embankment office workers and they are not wrong to be there. But the vaults before five, in the early-closing winter afternoon, with a glass of Amontillado and the candles already lit, are the version that earns the walk down the stairs.