The Colony Room Green closure has drawn a curtain, once again, over one of Soho’s most storied drinking dens, with the basement bar on Heddon Street pouring its last pint after just three years in its revived incarnation. The shuttering brings to an end a second chapter that many of London’s old guard had assumed would never come at all.
From Dean Street legend to Heddon Street basement
The original Colony Room Club was founded at 41 Dean Street in 1948 by Muriel Belcher. What followed over the next six decades was less a members’ club and more a pressure cooker for London’s creative restlessness: an emerald-green interior barely larger than a living room, thick with smoke and louche energy, where Francis Bacon held court and Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were regulars. Princess Margaret is said to have visited. A young Daniel Craig worked behind the bar, long before any of that.
By the time the club closed at the end of 2008, according to its Wikipedia entry, it was Dick Bradsell working the bar. Financial pressure had become too much for Michael Wojas, the barman-turned-owner who had steered the club through its final years, and he was forced to shut the doors on 41 Dean Street for good.
The loss sat badly with the people who had loved it. Which made the reappearance, in 2023, of something carrying the Colony Room name feel, briefly, like a minor miracle.
A three-month installation that lasted three years
Colony Room Green opened in the basement of 4 Heddon Street, around the corner from the original Dean Street address, beneath bar and restaurant Ziggy Green. The project was presided over by Darren Coffield, a painter and the author of the 2020 book Tales from the Colony Room. Its stated intention was a three-month immersive art installation, built around an early 2000s version of the club, designed to let regulars and the curious say a proper farewell. It became, instead, a going concern that outlived its original purpose by well over two years.
Unlike its predecessor, Colony Room Green was a public bar rather than a private members’ club, which opened the emerald-green mythology to a wider audience. The format kept faith with the original’s art-world identity: a rotating public gallery continued the tradition of hanging work on its walls, and live jazz ran Wednesday to Saturday, giving the basement a pulse that went beyond heritage tourism.
Restaurateurs Tom Onions and Prue Freeman ultimately decided to bring things to a close, according to the Daily Mail. The reasons behind their decision have not been set out publicly.
Colony Room Green closure: what comes next?
By the time the news broke, Colony Room Green had already served its last round. There is no pausing on the threshold for one final drink: the doors are shut. Whether Coffield, Onions, Freeman or anyone else connected to the project will seek a new venue remains unknown. No plans for a third incarnation have been announced.
What Colony Room Green managed, in its slightly accidental way, was to demonstrate that the appetite for this particular mythology has not dimmed. The original club closed in 2008 because the money ran out. The revival closed in 2026 because a three-month installation had simply, eventually, run its course. Those are different kinds of endings, and in some ways the latter is a gentler one.
For now, 4 Heddon Street’s basement is dark. The Colony Room name has closed twice in less than two decades, each time leaving Soho a little quieter and its regulars raking through memories of what used to happen in rooms painted that particular shade of green.