The first-floor Academy Club, situated up a rickety staircase on Soho’s Lexington Street, and its mother ship Andrew Edmunds restaurant, are both best known as haunts for London’s loucher literati. But at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) yesterday it was revealed that these intertwined establishments have also been a valuable seedbed for contemporary art. At the lunch to celebrate James Richards’s mesmerising new ICA show was longstanding Lexington Streeter Sir Norman Rosenthal—whose art-filled pad adjoins Andrew Edmunds—and on Sir N’s arm was his Soho neighbour Mandana Ruane, the magnificent manager of the Academy who also presides over the restaurant below.
Ruane disclosed that what had tempted her out of her Soho eyrie was the fact that, before being garlanded with solo shows across Europe, a Turner Prize nomination and the 2012 Jarman Award, James Richards had been one of her favourite waiters at the restaurant and remains a loyal patron. Also present at the ICA was another Academy/Edmunds artist employee, the painter Martin Gustavsson, who even had a studio at the back of the Academy for a while. “It’s the Lexington Mafia!” enthused Sir N, as he gathered Richards and his Soho contingent around him—with the only absence being the latest member of the Academy’s art wing, the dealer Karsten Schubert, who apparently has also just opened a new office at the back of the club.
As Crossrail carves up the streets of Soho, the franchises move in and rents rocket, it is heartening to learn that these small strongholds—along with such key galleries as Frith Street, Sadie Coles and Southard Reid—are keeping the cultural flag flying.