Art met hotels one evening two weeks ago in the Soho area of London when Richard Lewis, the former CEO of Best Western (Great Britain), hosted his inaugural show.
Lewis started his career in hotels at London’s Savoy Hotel Group, and he has traveled widely.
In recent years, he had a management role at What3Words, an app-based geocoding tool that many people I have spoken to consider as revolutionary. It divides the world into 57 trillion three-meter-by-three-meter squares, each permanently given three words that aid the quick, accurate location of any spot on the planet.
Mongol Post was one of its first clients, and that makes sense.
A great deal of homes in Mongolia are very rural, and some of its homes move alongside their owners’ livestock, so having a process that allows that moving home always to be located is, I say again, novel.
Hikers and adventurers lost on mountains or misty hills, some injured, have been rescued because of such pinpoint accuracy.
Looking at Lewis’ art, I was struck with that same sense of definition and exactness.
I do not claim to know or understand art. The art on display leaned toward the pop-art spectrum. There was repetition, which I love in music, art, literature, lists, distance running, challenges and pretty much everything else.
There were quartets of pieces featuring a returning traveler, thoughts she has had on her return, and questions you might wish to ask yourself or her. Each piece featured a different color.
The booklet available at the show stated that Lewis’ art employs “multiple layers, optical glass, brushed aluminum and canvas, giving his latest studies extra depth,” and I write that here verbatim so I do not get bogged down in a whirlpool of my own inability in describing someone else’s viewpoint and vision.
The Union Club, located on Greek Street and where the art show was held, was also much to my liking. It is a members club attracting, so its website says, “a quirky and discerning bunch.”
I met some of those folks on that Monday evening. Two fellow guests, a couple, were marathon runners and once cycled from Mexico City to Ushuaia, Argentina, a journey that is at least 8,600 miles and most likely in reality a lot, lot more.
My immediate question I wanted to ask was, “how did you get across the Darién Gap?” That one question showed I was at least aware of the geography in question of that epic perambulation down three-quarters of the length of the Americas.
We started a 60-minute conversation on travel, which is a great way of spending an hour.
I consider a cycle like that as some form of art. It is a beautiful dot-to-dot connection of the map, contour lines, the brush strokes of a continent.
There is an obvious connection between that journey and Lewis’ What3Words adventure, and I liked that connection, although I did not learn about how these two parties know one another.
There’s another story there, and perhaps more art and journeys.
Hotels have a way of soaking up stories and experiences, and hoteliers do the same.
Walking through Soho that evening also was a micro-journey.
I do not go that way often, the streets of which I knew like the back of my hand when I was young.
The Intrepid Fox on Wardour Street was the pub of choice for its loud music and colorful clientele. There was lots of hair, I seem to remember. It closed in the mid-2000s after more than 220 years of pulling pints and playing rock anthems, or, when it first opened, perhaps playing Mozart, the pop icon of his time. The pub and composer both existed for about a decade in the late 18th Century.
The pub is now a burger bar called Moo!
Just down the same road is the St. Moritz Club, which opened in the 1960s and still a going concern. Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, Motorhead’s wild man of rock, used to buy drinks for us when we came by, but only if he was not funneling coins into the one-armed bandit. One did not dare to talk to him when he was in that way engaged.
A little farther along, Hare Krishna devotees dressed in orange would serve vegetarian food to anyone who wanted to eat, and they still operate, too.
Soho had a seedier side, which now has mostly been cleaned up, just as have 8th Avenue and 42nd Street in New York City, the tail end of that epoch I just remember when I moved to the Big Apple in 1993.
Back in Soho — which gets its name, supposedly, from a call hunters and carriage drivers shouted out to make publicans aware of their arrivals — on Greek Street, two streets over from Wardour Street, is the legendary Coach & Horses pub. I once saw one of its most famous drinkers sitting in the corner there, but I definitely did not dare to speak to him.
He was Jeffrey Bernard, a journalist, who wrote a column called “Low Life” for The Spectator magazine. That column chronicled his drinking and the area’s seedier side, but his own liberalness with the Coach & Horses’ main sales product often saw the column not get filed on time.
When that happened, as has gone down in legend, the magazine would print in place of the article the one line “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell,” which became the title of a West End play about him that was first staged in 1989, almost 10 years before Bernard’s death.
Art, memories, travel and a glass of wine, a fine playlist for an evening.
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