Laura Craik on Rigby & Peller's royal dressing down

The last thing you probably want to do this weekend is go to the pub.

Unless you’re me. I always want to go to the pub. Especially in January, when everyone else is muttering, ‘Never again’. Alas, I have turned into a person who talks about going to the pub but seldom does. ‘We should go for a pint!’ I’ll trill, as though this were exotic. Which, sadly, it is. Pub, and her siblings Spontaneity and Freedom, are a merry triumvirate lost down the back of the sofa many moons ago.

So when I noticed my favourite local pub had closed for ‘substantial redevelopment’, I guess I shouldn’t have cared. Only the Sir Richard Steele (to give it its full name) was the white-hot centre of my youth. Actually, it was the white-hot centre of my 30s, which makes it even more poignant because while you can squander your youth, you really mustn’t squander your 30s. Every night out should be a good one, as every night at the Steele was — a messy confluence of cruddy toilets, charismatic alkies, spilled pints of Stella and sightings of Noel Gallagher, Sadie Frost, Hugo Speer, Robbie Williams and Davinia ‘Loo Roll Queen’ Taylor arm in arm with Kate Moss.

At present its website says ‘See you again soon!’ But for the pub eulogiser in 2018, ‘substantial redevelopment’ is not a phrase that suggests more glory days are set to come, but hey, I’d love to be proved wrong. The Load of Hay and The Adelaide are just a couple of my locals that are currently closed, and it’s the same all over London.

Like pubs, music venues are under threat, which is why last week’s proposed new law, tabled in the House of Commons to protect them, is welcome. Some of Britain’s best artists were discovered in London’s pubs, clubs and dive bars. Cities change: it is their beauty. Habits change, London will always be in flux, but some of its charms are worth preserving. They’re why we moved here, why we stay and why we love it.

Legend of the pre-fall

Is it wrong to be lusting after pre-fall fashion already? It sure is for my bank balance; all kinds of wrong. Yet having conducted a deep and meaningful relationship with her sweatpants every evening since Boxing Day, a girl needs something new and exciting to yearn for and next season, this girl is yearning for Chloé (words I haven’t written since the Phoebe Philo years). Designer Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s collection won’t be available until February at the earliest, but it’s a corker. Ribbed socks + Seventies prints + the return of the horse motif = winning. To all those wondering how they can possibly live without Céline: you may have found your answer.

A dressing down

Rigby & Peller has been stripped of its royal warrant after 57 years, and not because Princess Anne found her bra chaffing but because the company’s 82-year-old founder, June Kenton, wrote a book (left) detailing the lingerie secrets of her royal clients. I like gossip as much as the next person, but I really don’t need to know that the Queen was fitted for her bra ‘half dressed and in front of her corgis’ (of course she was half-dressed: it would be a rum bra that would have any efficacy if it were fitted fully clothed). It’s always millennials that take the rap for over-sharing: Kenton is a reminder that the curse of TMI can afflict any age group. However tempting or lucrative it may be to spill the beans, some things are best kept secret.