Fulham town

After the visit to the palace noticed at reference 1, time for lunch in Fulham town. What about the once grand King's Head?

King's Head then

Note the bread wagon, right.

King's Head now

According to Wikipedia, a grade II listed building, built in 1906 in something called the Scottish baronial style, and having gone through various owners and incarnations since then. At one time it must have been quite a place - but since then it has had something of a predilection for the South African trade. But not altogether clear whether it still functioned, and it did not look as if it functioned for pensioners' lunches. Fortunately, at the other side of the road there was what looked like a successful Italian restaurant (reference 3), quiet for Monday lunch, but which looked as if it had the potential to be very busy evenings and weekends.

Front view hidden by bus

A very pleasant lunch, taken in the back room, right in the snap. With our main course being a very acceptable meat lasagne. Taken with a very acceptable half litre carafe of house white. Said to be from Sardinia.

Dessert

A tiramisu which was very creamy and very flat, served on the plate just visible bottom left above. And an ice cream served with coffee, in the natty containers top left. Probably grappa in the small glass bottom middle.

A restaurant which was graced with a male family portrait. The second time we have seen such a thing in a restaurant, the first, an older male rather than a younger male, having been noticed at reference 4. But both, as it happens, Italian flavoured restaurants.

Temperance Hall

Not to be outdone, a few years after the building of the King's Head, the temperance movement got its own company, the Temperance Billiard Halls Co. Ltd., to build a temperance billiard hall just down the road. With its final indignity being conversion into a public house, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation as same. It is perhaps some consolation that it also is a Grade II listed building.

King's Arms

They clearly had a taste for grand public buildings in Fulham, with the King's Arms sporting this very fancy entrance to what might have started life as its yard. Perhaps the fancy work was put in by someone else, perhaps a dairy or something of that sort? Note all the other fancy work out front, shifting to brown brick elsewhere. A Charrington's house at one point, judging by the letters top middle. Was it patronised by all the ICL folk who used to live in the tower blocks around the corner? Where I once used to visit from time to time, before they sold out to Fujitsu. And, seemingly, Wadworth's first foray into the London pub scene. Wadworth's being a beer I first came across in Devizes, at a time when they seemed to own all the houses in town. A bit like Arkell's in Swindon, which I came to know some twenty years later.

Unable to buy a Guardian from the convenience store opposite the station so settled for an LRB and an Irish Independent. The headline to which last was all about the continuing fall of house prices in the Dublin area, against rises in most other places. Is the market still settling down after the bubble followed by crash of more than ten years ago now? We were also told about a sprint hurdler by the name of Sarah Lavin, who appears to have put herself through it in order to recover form after something called a stress fracture in one of her naviculars. Like in many other competitive disciplines these days, it seems that you can't both excel and have a normal young life - or even fail to excel and have a normal young life. Nor, in the case of ladies, to judge by her picture, do you retain much maidenly modesty. But a pleasant change from the Guardian, reminding me of the leading papers in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. And, no doubt, the Channel Islands. All very old-fashioned and I don't suppose it is that long since they stopped doing farming and matrimonial advertisements.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/fulham.html.

Reference 2: https://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/Fulham/KingsHead.shtml.

Reference 3: https://www.pappaciccia.com/.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/wigmore-one.html.