Bar Italia is an Italian café located on Frith Street 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 develo ...

district of

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, 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 dow ...

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 dem ...

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 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''. 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 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 pupi ...

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 painted the portrait of Movie Producer Jeremy Thomas 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