1936 On the Continent

London where artists, M.P.s, models, and several lower grades of society mix in noisy and semi-continental surroundings.
Night Clubs
    Lastly comes the question of night clubs and their shady relatives, the bottle parties. The doyen of night clubs is the Embassy at the Piccadilly end of Bond Street: then, especially on Thursday nights, you will find London’s smartest and best-dressed women and the most exclusive of the semi-demi-monde. But you must be either a member or be signed in by one. It is expensive but it’s worth it—occasionally.
Bottle Parties
    The bottle parties are one escape from our ridiculous licensing laws. Briefly the system is this: You join themat your first visit or before being duly proposed and seconded by any other member for which purpose there is always someone on the premises to sign for you. You then are given an order form on which you order vast quantities of any drink you might be likely to want, but
you don’t have to pay for it
until you drink it. Then you’re within the law to drink to any hour of the night. There are said to be some six-hundred of these places within a two-mile radius of Leicester Square: they range from the highest of the high (as such things go) to the lowest of the low. To give an idea of them would take half this whole guide. I suggest, therefore, that you ask your hotel porter, a taxi driver, or any commissionaire round the West End, and any of them can put you on to dozens. The “400” in Leicester Square is the most respectable, and there you must be dressed, but they go rapidly down from dress suits to dungarees, from pure white to pure black, but don’t blame me if the police raid the low one you choose. I disclaim all responsibility.
    Anyway, I hope I’ve been some help.

    ALONG THE THAMES
By GEOFFREY PINNOCK
London to Oxford
    T HE Thames—without which London would lose so great a portion of its romance and personality—is the most satisfying river in England. Its scenery ranges from the placid green loveliness of such stretches as Cliveden Reach, where the wooded hills rise in soft curves straight from the waterside, to the mysterious, smoky underworld setting of Wapping, Limehouse, and the dock quarters.
    Down its slow stream have flowed, as it were, most of the big events of English history. The old fords, commemorated by such place-names as Wallingford, were used by the invading Roman legions, and by the dim, skin-clad primitive tribes who were there before them. Viking galleys sailed up the river, pillaging and colonising. King John signed his Great Charta, sullen and swearing, on the mid-stream island of Runnymede. And at the Tower of London, whose bastions stand darkly above the river, some of the most splendid and most tragic happenings of the pageant of English history have been enacted.
Where the River Begins
    Sleepy old villages whose thatched roofs are hidden among the great riverside elms; comfortable old inns, with their bar windows looking out upon the willows and the passing boats and the gliding white swans; castles like Windsor and palaces like Hampton Court; fashionable centres like Henley and Richmond—all these stand upon the banks of the Thames.
    And east of London Bridge begins that last seaward stretch of the Thames, upon whose broad waters the big shipping steams, bound in and out of London from Valparaiso and Vladivostock and the far harbours of the world.
    The 209 miles of the Thames begin, geographically, in a spring that bubbles like liquid glass out of a meadow on a slope of the Cotswold Hills. But for Londoners, and for visitors to London, the river begins at Westminster Pier, beneath the benign vastness of Big Ben, and runs east to Southend, Margate and Ramsgate, and west to Oxford.
    These points form the limit of steamer traffic, and if you wish to explore the upper miles of the river—and they are very charming, and right off the worldly track—you must hire a punt or canoe and make a camping holiday of it, or put up at nights at one of the pleasant waterside inns at places such as Cricklade, Lechlade or Kempsford.
Westminster to Twickenham
    From Westminster to Mortlake the Thames is not exhilarating in its scenery, but for all that it has a good deal of interest. At Putney, where the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race starts, the towpath also has its beginning, and continues on one side of the river or the other (the various bridges link it up) all the way to Lechlade. So that one may walk or ride a bicycle