The iconic India Club restaurant located in Hotel Strand Continental in London, is poised to bid farewell to its patrons as it prepares to cease operations next month. The restaurant which has links to India’s freedom movement was founded in the 1950s by the members of India League, the London-based organisation which supported India’s freedom movement.
According to a BBC report, India Club was founded as a space for the Indian immigrants to meet each other and socialise. It has a historical significance for the South Asian community in London. The founding members of India League included VK Krishna Menon, the first Indian High Commission to the United Kingdom and India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawahalal Nehru, among others.
The founding chair at the Centre of Migration and Diaspora Studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Parvathi Raman told PTI, "Krishna intended that the India Club to be a place where young Indians living on a shoestring could afford to eat, discuss politics and plan their futures."
Although the India Club had won a battle to preserve the building from demolition a few years back, now even after the present proprietors Yadgar Marker and his daughter Phiroza’s "Save India Club" movement, they had to announce the closure of the club.
As reported by PTI, Yadgar and his daughter said, "Since its opening over 70 years ago, the India Club has been a home-away-from-home to the first-generation immigrants from India, as well as a community space for Indo-British groups."
"It is with a very heavy heart that we are announcing the closure of the India Club, with our last day open to the public on September 17." they added.
According to the BBC report, the Markers bought the lease to the property in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor tweeted sharing his father’s association with the iconic restaurant.
"An excellent piece on the much-lamented imminent demise of a British-Indian institution, the India Club, founded in 1951 by Krishna Menon and a few tireless youngsters like my father Chandran Tharoor," Tharoor wrote.
In the 1950s and 60s, India Club was the only place for meetings of Indians, according to Kusoom Vadgama, a historian who regularly visited the Club after she moved to the UK in 1953, the BBC report added.
The interiors of the Club were designed to exhibit the coffee shops of pre-independence India and the chandeliers, tables and straight-backed chairs of the Club remained largely unchanged since it was opened in the 1950s, the report added.
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