Blood and champers in SW1

Most passers-by miss The Star Tavern, obscured as it is by the arch framing the northern entrance to Belgrave Mews West. Tonight, though, they will have a brief glimpse inside, after a 1963 Austin Healey has spun past Mossiman's, rounded Belgrave Square, and come to a stop on the mews's cobblestones.

The Healey's driver - a tall, bespectacled man called Bruce Reynolds - is returning to an old haunt, the pub where he planned the Great Train Robbery. But that is only one episode in The Star's script - one ripe with a violence peculiarly at odds with the pub's place in the heart of Belgravia.

For a century or so, The Star fulfilled its original purpose as a place of refreshment for domestic staff employed in the surrounding houses. But after the Second World War it acquired a more variegated clientele. Some were the offspring of patrician families; others, a more abrasive crew, intent on emulating the pub's richer patrons by whatever means necessary. It was this second group which laid claim to The Star's upstairs room.

Among them was Billy Hill who, on the 9 July 1947, sent 200 of his associates into Soho, armed with hammers, axes, razors and even hand grenades, to convince rival "entrepreneurs" to accept his authority. After this, robberies went ahead only with Hill's agreement. It was, as one observer reflected at his death in 1984, a case of "blood, champagne and girls all the way".

The blood was not spilled only in Soho. There was a savage confrontation in The Star between Hill and Eddie Chapman, a Coldstream Guardsman turned safe-cracker. Sunderland-born Chapman had been discovered by the Germans in a Jersey prison when they occupied the island. They "persuaded" him to parachute into England as a saboteur.

By the time he landed, our secret service had broken enough codes to know what his mission was. Rechristened Zigzag by MI5, Chapman - assisted by a master illusionist - "blew up" a De Havilland aircraft factory so convincingly that, on his return to Germany, he was awarded the Iron Cross. MI5 subsequently declined his numerous offers to assassinate Hitler. Chapman was, though, prepared to make peace with Hill, and the pair worked together on contraband and kidnapping operations in Hill's yacht, Flamingo.

Their occasional absences were not enough to ensure tranquillity at The Star, primarily thanks to the landlord, Paddy Kennedy. "He was clearly a tough - he didn't have to open his mouth for you to understand that," remembers one sexagenarian Old Etonian, a survivor from the late Fifties and early Sixties, when the pub was patronised by the so-called Chelsea set. "If you displeased Kennedy in any way, he'd chuck you out - if need be, by force. I saw violence in there but it involved people I hadn't had the pleasure of being introduced to."

But Kennedy was not all brute force and ignorance. His dexterity reputedly extended to balancing a tray of martinis on his membrum virile - an accomplishment which may partly explain how he endeared himself to Christine Keeler, a Star habitu?, and to a less frequent customer, Elizabeth Taylor.

The current landlord, another Irishman, 55-year-old TJ Connell, arrived at the pub only four years ago, but soon learned details of Kennedy's reign, including his technique for persuading Elizabeth Taylor to relinquish her place by the bar ("Get your fat arse off that stool and let my friend sit down." Miss Taylor did as bidden. "She knew the score," explains TJ), and of the man thrown from one of the upstairs rooms on to the cobbles below. "He died as a result of it, but on the death certificate it was recorded as 'Died of Natural Causes', so they had some clout."

On another occasion a new area manager for the brewery came to collect some overdue takings. Arriving before opening time, he was allowed in. The door was bolted behind him, then Kennedy unleashed his Alsatian. "The manager ran behind the bar - the worse thing he could have done because the Alsatian regarded that as his territory. Paddy's wife rescued him, but he never collected any money."