Bar Italia is an Italian café located on

Frith Street Frith Street is in the Soho area of London. To the north is Soho Square and to the south is Shaftesbury Avenue. The street crosses Old Compton Street, Bateman Street and Romilly Street. History Frith Street was laid out in the late 1670s an ...

in the

Soho Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was develop ...

district of

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Location and notable events

On 26 January 1926,

John Logie Baird John Logie Baird FRSE (; 13 August 188814 June 1946) was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926. He went on to invent the first publicly demo ...

gave the first public demonstration of

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

at 22 Frith Street, the building where Bar Italia is located. The

blue plaque A blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving as a historical marker. The term i ...

above the front door commemorates this event. Bar Italia in its present form was opened as a café in 1949 by the Polledri family, and is still owned by Veronica and Anthony Polledri today.

In popular culture

Bar Italia inspired the song of the same name by the band

Pulp Pulp may refer to: * Pulp (fruit), the inner flesh of fruit Engineering * Dissolving pulp, highly purified cellulose used in fibre and film manufacture * Pulp (paper), the fibrous material used to make paper * Molded pulp, a packaging material ...

, which is the last track of their 1995 album ''

Different Class ''Different Class'' (released in Japan as ''Common People'') is the fifth studio album by English rock band Pulp, released on 30 October 1995 by Island Records. The album was a critical and commercial success, entering the UK Albums Chart at nu ...

''. The song describes the cafe as "round the corner in Soho" and "where other broken people go." In November 2010, it was announced that Dave Stewart and

Ian La Frenais Ian La Frenais (born 7 January 1937) is an English writer best known for his creative partnership with Dick Clement. They are most famous for television series including ''The Likely Lads'', ''Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?'', ''Porridg ...

were writing a stage musical about the cafe which will be called Bar Italia. Stewart was quoted as saying, "This coffee shop is very small but what goes on in there is as big as the world." In July 2011, British artist Ed Gray unveiled a painting of Bar Italia featuring patrons

Rupert Everett Rupert James Hector Everett (; born 29 May 1959) is an English actor, director and producer. Everett first came to public attention in 1981 when he was cast in Julian Mitchell's play and subsequent film '' Another Country'' (1984) as a gay pupil ...

and

John Hurt Sir John Vincent Hurt (22 January 1940 – 25 January 2017) was an English actor whose career spanned over five decades. Hurt was regarded as one of Britain's finest actors. Director David Lynch described him as "simply the greatest actor in t ...

. It now hangs in the cafe's window. In 2016

Carl Randall Carl Randall (born 1975) is a British figurative painter, whose work is based on images of modern Japan and London. Education Randall is a graduate of The Slade School of Fine Art London (BA Fine Art), the Royal Drawing School London (The Dra ...

painted the portrait of Movie Producer

Jeremy Thomas Jeremy Jack Thomas, CBE (born 26 July 1949) is a British film producer, founder and chairman of Recorded Picture Company. He produced Bernardo Bertolucci's ''The Last Emperor'', which won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2006 he rece ...

standing in front of Bar Italia, as part of the artist's 'London Portraits' series, where he asked various cultural figures to choose a place in London for the backdrop of their portraits. In an interview Thomas explained he chose Bar Italia for this portrait "because I like being there, I go there regularly, I feel comfortable there....theres a bohemianism in this place and its full of memories of mine since I was a lad". A print of the painting is hanging on the cafes wall.

Awards

Bar Italia was awarded the 2010 London Lifestyle Award for London Coffee Shop of the Year.

References

Coffeehouses and cafés in London Restaurants in London Restaurants established in 1949 Soho, London {{Restaurants in London