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Picture source: Mac Booker

The Catherine Wheel was situated at 23 Kensington Church Street. This pub closed in 2003 and is now used as a Lebanese restaurant called Randa.

In 1993 I was a young American ex-pat student in London and worked at the Catherine Wheel pub in Kensington for a few weeks. The publicans were a lovely Irish family, and I worked shifts with their son, who was about my age (early 20s). One day, I was serving drinks to a table with several rock types accompanied by a few young models and a man with rotten teeth that grinned at me from ear to ear. When I went back behind the bar, the publican's son asked me: ""Do you know who you just served?" My puzzled response was: "You mean that madlad with the bad teeth?" "Well, that's Shane MacGowan from the Pogues!" I didn't know at the time what living legend o'l Shane was, nor, as an American, was I familiar with his hit song 'Fairytale of New York', but I've made up for my ignorance, and I'm a huge Pogues fan now and have even seen them live in San Francisco (where I almost get beaten up by a bunch of Irish madlads during the show, but that that's another story). Today I found out that the Catherine Wheel pub is no more and the building is now a Lebanese Restaurant. Sad that London is losing its historical pubs.

Max Milano (June 2022)

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