Criterion Restaurant

The Criterion Restaurant at 224 Piccadilly is a Grade I listed restaurant beneath the south side of Piccadilly Circus, whose Byzantine gold mosaic ceiling – designed by Thomas Verity and completed in 1875 – is among the most spectacular Victorian interiors in London. It is also one of the oldest documented gay venues in the city.

The entrance is a few steps below pavement level, opening into a long hall of mirrored arches and gilded tiles that has changed remarkably little in a hundred and fifty years. By the early twentieth century the restaurant had become, in the words of the gay diarist and activist George Ives, writing around 1905, "a great centre for inverts." Ives – who coined the phrase "the Cause" for the movement towards homosexual equality and kept meticulous records of queer London life – was one of many who used the Criterion as a meeting place.

By the 1920s the regular clientele had given it two nicknames. The Witches' Cauldron acknowledged the theatrical, gender-nonconforming character of much of its clientele. The Bargain Basement was a practical observation about its below-street location and affordable daytime menu. In 1932 a social observer documented around 200 men at the Criterion "behaving openly affectionately" – wearing berets, coloured sweaters, and makeup, producing lipstick and applying it at the tables, greeting each other with kisses. This was not a hidden corner of the room; it was the room.

The Metropolitan Police used Defence Regulations to threaten the Criterion's licence repeatedly through the 1930s. The management ignored them. The Criterion is still here.