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A rare photo of the interior of a cabmen's shelter. Pat Carter has operated the Warwick Avenue shelter (also known by its restaurant name, "Little Venice") for 17 years. In 2008 she was featured in a local daily newspaper and appeared as a guest on the BBC-TV cooking show Ready, Steady, Cook! For more about Ms Carter, see Call Sign Magazine, May, 2008, p. 30. John Bainbridge commented on the favourable customer reaction to meals in the Warwick Avenue shelter in his 1986 article in Gourmet Magazine
Source:
Pat Carter serving customers in the Warwick Avenue cabmen's shelter. Photograph by Alan Fisher.
Photo provided by Alan Fisher, editor, Call Sign Magazine.
Bloomsday for Cab Drivers / 29
The Cabmen's Shelter / 7
In earlier years the food even attracted celebrities from time to time.
Sir Ernest Shackleton, the polar explorer, frequented the Hyde Park Corner shelter, and the artist John Singer Sargent (along with Grand Duke Michael of Russia) favoured the shelter near the Ritz Hotel in Picadilly Circus.
The Picadilly shelter was nicknamed the "Junior Turf Club" by the aristocratic revellers who patronized it in the 1920s and smuggled in champagne despite its teetotal regulations.