On a warm summer Saturday, the heaving café terraces and bourgeois pubs of Fitzrovia make it hard to imagine this was the heart of bohemian London a century ago. The few hints of its radical past linger on heritage street signs recalling how this genteel pocket hosted the International Anarchist School and the Communist Club and was once frequented by writers (Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell among them) and progressive thinkers such as Robert Owen, the father of British socialism.
Hints linger, too, at The Newman, an 81-room hotel opened in February – though its sleek bay-window-and-brick facade gives few clues to the eccentricities inside.
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