Everything in London has changed, except the familiar scents of the Oratory

It has taken two-and-a-half years, but I have finally crossed the Rubicon and feel a stranger in the city that was home for more than two decades.

In London for a book launch last month, it became horribly apparent that things had moved on without me. Never a Pret a Manger where I left one. New stops popping up on the digital signs of the Northern Line in an unsettling, slightly creepy kind of way – like something from a Ray Bradbury short story. Topshop, the mothership of my adolescence, gone from Oxford Circus – and as for the “Lizzie Line”: well, possibly my inverted commas indicate that the idea of negotiating it makes me feel like a dowager throwing up her hands when someone mentions “The Facebook”.

In the refurbished National Portrait Gallery, I struggled to find my beloved Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Outside on the Charing Cross Road, I felt like a befuddled tourist as I tried to summon the quickest way to South Kensington from one of the dustier recesses of my memory. But my command of the city’s transport arteries had gone for good. I gave in and downloaded the Citymapper app.

A friend had suggested meeting for coffee in the Old Brompton Road branch of Ole & Steen. As I waited in the gloom (the lighting is apparently deliberately low because they assume everyone will be on screens), I squinted at my hardback copy of Graham Greene’s memoir, A Sort of Life. A relic, a country mouse, in one more iteration I would be one of those tiresome people who stand on the left on the Tube escalators and fumble for their ticket when they get to the turnstile, not before.

“But I’m not that old!” I wanted to stand up and shout. “How has this happened?!” How have I come so adrift so quickly in a place that, until the very recent past, I thought I knew intimately?

It was heaven to catch up with my friend, though I blanched when she pulled out her phone to check the time left on her parking space. Driving in central London had been fraught enough when we left; a complex videogame of 20mph speed traps and punitive Low Transport Neighbourhoods to avoid, the looming iniquity of the Ulez. 

After she’d gone back to work, and with an hour to kill before the party, I suddenly felt the pull of another, more majestic mothership. The Brompton Oratory became my North Star in my 20s, as I began tentatively tagging along with friends to Mass, eventually embarking on Instruction.

I walked back past the Tube station (no need for Citymapper), past the Medici Gallery and the pretty parade of shops that Transport for London is about to redevelop or ruin, depending on your point of view. Past the Victoria & Albert museum where, as the last visitors were spilling out, caterers were already unloading for whichever glamorous party it had been pimped out to that night.

On the steps outside the church, I paused, pressing my nose up against a Proustian window. I remembered the turmoil of those years – and the fun – which both, in their own peculiar way, drew, or perhaps pushed me there.

I remembered our old haunts: Patisserie Valerie before High Mass on a Sunday, where we calculated that if you ate an éclair on arrival you could still fulfil the hour’s fast, as even the speedier, more athletic fathers never got to Communion before 11.45 am. There was the Brompton Brasserie for a jolly steak frites dinner and Racine, that most perfect of neighbourhood restaurants, for festivities – or if someone else was paying. All gone now, of course. Racine held its last service in 2015; Knightsbridge wasn’t much of a neighbourhood by then. With so much property bought as investments by non-doms, the stream of regulars had become a trickle.

Footfall at the Oratory never dwindled, though (we won’t think about when the churches were closed), and once inside, the hushed grandeur, the fading scent of incense and beeswax from the last Mass enveloped me and I was home, even before I trailed my fingers through the holy water in the stoup and bent my knee.

A smart gentleman I once met out hunting told me he had made sure that his four children could ride, ski, swim and play tennis, “so that wherever they go in the world, they can make friends”. I’ve managed two, possibly three, of those but baulk at tennis. I’m terrified of the ghastly, glossy girls who play it.

Instead, I hope to bequeath to my children that sense of coming home, wherever they may be, when they step inside a Catholic church. A sense of peace, calm and possibly a kindred spirit or two.

A dear friend from those Oratory days often gives up going out for lunch for Lent. Though he has lamented that since Racine closed, it’s hardly worth bothering. “Ah, the calves’ brains”, he sighs. For me it was the veal chop with Roquefort butter, which I’ve tried many times to recreate at home.

Yet news reaches me of a resurrection, of sorts: this adored bistro has reopened, a 20-minute journey around the Circle Line. Bouch-on Racine, upstairs in the Three Horseshoes, opposite Farringdon Station. Tête du veau is very much on the menu. Getting a table, however, is a matter of camels and needles.

I’d be terribly grateful if you could remember me and my chops in your intentions, as Easter approaches…

This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.

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