GEORGE ORWELL

Location: 50 Lawford Road, NW5 2LN

22 Portobello Road, W11 3DH (orange, brown)

Gardening

Plants and the natural world pervaded Orwell's fiction. He claimed that after his writing, gardening was the most important thing in his life. Roses informed the final lines of 1984.

One of the spurs to writing the novel was the Soviet controversy over genetics. The suppression of the truth in science.

A woman reader of Tribune wrote to the publication to complain that flowers were bourgeois.

Ice Skating

Orwell had a fondness for ice-skating. He used to indulge in it at Streatham Ice Rink.

Location: Streatham Ice & Leisure Centre, 390 Streatham High Road, SW16 6HX

See Also: SPORTS Ice Skating

Website: www.better.org.uk/leisure-centre/london/lambeth/streatham-ice-and-leisure-centre/streatham-ice-rinck https://beta.lambeth.gov.uk/leisure-centres/streatham-ice-leisure-centre

The Moon Under Water

The J.D. Wetherspoon pub business was founded by Tim Martin, a barrister, who had been unable to find anywhere that he wanted to go to for a drink and so set about doing something about his predicament. He named the business Wetherspoon after a particularly straight-laced school master who had taught him, and whom he regarded as being about the last person who would ever be likely to run a pub.¹ The chain's use of The Moon Under Water came from a 1946 essay in which George Orwell (n Eric Blair) had described his ideal pub of the same name, which had every characteristic that he desired in a hostelry bar the fact that it did not exist. He believed that the qualities of a good pub were draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio. He believed that the banning of children from them caused many to be mere boozing-shops .

The three Islington pubs that The Moon Under Water was based principally upon were The Canonbury Tavern, The Compton Arms, and The Hen Chickens. The first two have links to 1984. The Canonbury s garden has a chestnut tree. The song in 1984 is Under The Spreading Chestnut Tree.

The Evening Standard newspaper published Orwell's essay in February 1946.

Location: 28 Leicester Square, WC2H 7LE. (Despite the name, perhaps neither quite the location nor the pub are likely to have been what Orwell had had in mind.) (purple, red)

The Canonbury Tavern, 21 Canonbury Place, N1 2NS (red, yellow)

The Compton Arms, 4 Compton Avenue, N1 2XD (red, pink)

The Hen & Chickens, 109 St Paul s Road, N1 2NA (red, brown)

¹. The first Wetherspoon was Marler's Bar in Colney Hatch Lane.

The Orwell Prize

Orwell had not wanted a biography to be written. However, Sonia Orwell disliked one that an American academic wrote. She chose Bernard Crick because she had been favourably impressed by a review of his that had been published in the New Statesman.

In the views of some of Crick's Orwell said about as much about the author as it did about the subject. Crick used some of his royalties to set up The George Orwell Memorial Trust and to establish the Orwell Prize for political writing.

See Also: BIOGRAPHY

Website: http://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-prizes www.theorwellprize.co.uk (A prize for political writing)

Room 101

In the 1920s Herbert Austen Hall-designed an Art Deco style department store that was built at Nos. 200-212 Oxford Street. In 1942, during the Second World War, the B.B.C. used the building as office space.

Orwell had had tuberculosis, therefore, the military authorities refused to allow him to enlist; it was commented that he had put more effort into trying to enlist in the Army than some people had in trying to leave it. In summer 1941 he joined the B.B.C. as a producer in its Far Eastern section. This was based at Nos. 200-212. He described the atmosphere in Broadcasting House as being a cross between a girls school and a lunatic asylum. In 1943 he coined the term Cold War in an article that he wrote for the Manchester Evening News newspaper.

In Orwell's novel 1984 (1949), Room 101 was where disloyal citizens of Oceania were taken in order to face the things that they most feared. It is generally accepted that the writer used his experience of working for the B.B.C. as the basis for the room being located in a large bureaucratic building.

Location: 200-212 Oxford Street, W1D 1NU. (Sensitive material at 200 Oxford Street had to be thrown down the Memory Hole. This was over the River Tyburn.) (purple, blue)

Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU. Orwell's first wife worked for the Ministry of Information, which, during the war, was based the University of London's sinister-looking Senate House building. (orange, brown)

Tribune

In autumn 1943 Mr Blair left the B.B.C. in order to become the literary editor of The Tribune, a left-wing weekly for which he wrote the As I Please column under the pseudonym George Orwell .

In his new position, Orwell gave out some reviewing work to Peter Vansittart, an aspirant writer who had been educated at a public school. Upon one occasion the pair were drinking in a pub near to the paper's offices. The experienced hand gave the neophyte a lecture in which he stated that with an accent like that and a tie like that you will never be accepted by the working classes . The impact of this counsel was promptly undermined when the barman addressed Vansittart by his forename and Orwell as Sir .

Following the advent of peace and the publication and success of Animal Farm (1945), Orwell's Tribune essays more vehement in their tone.

Location: 222-225 Strand, WC2R 1BA. The offices of the Tribune. (red, yellow)

See Also: CLASS

David Backhouse 2024