LSE – The Worshipful Company of Stoners

Trudging through a dank and deserted Square Mile this week, turning the corner at Old Broad Street onto Throgmorton Street, an Alphaville regular came across this . . . 

Those are plastic pots for holding plants. Pot plants. Weed.

This is the subterranean site of the long-closed, but Grade 1-listed, Throgmorton Bars and Restaurant, that included The Long Room — gossip-central for stock market traders until the closure of the London Stock Exchange floor in the late 80s.

It was the inspiration for Alphaville’s own Long Room forum.

Thorgmortons sits deep underground, beneath the Worshipful Company of Drapers, who have been there since 1543, when the livery hall purchased the London mansion of Thomas Cromwell from King Henry VIII. Cromwell had lost his head three years earlier, of course.

Seemingly, last year this richly-mosaicked establishment was taken over by a team of purported private club entrepreneurs, with a refurbished series of bars and restaurants planned.

Since, perhaps due to the small matter of a pandemic, they seem to have pivoted to the construction of a massive weed farm. The cops busted the operation on Tuesday.

Thorgmortons was first kitted out in 1900 as the gilded flagship restaurant of J Lyons & Co, the catering-to-computers conglomerate founded by Joseph Lyons six years earlier. The Lyons family went on to establish a chain of tea shops across Britain, along with a range of branded cakes and biscuits. It was broken up in the ‘70s.

Margaret Thatcher worked for the company as a chemist before becoming a Tory MP in 1959.

It’s often said that The City is a hot bed for laundered drug money, but we never thought the upstream would reach the Square Mile. For this time at least, we’re happy to be proven wrong.