Culture

Virgin Atlantic and Tea & Sympathy

'Less known than almost any of the foreign quarters of New York is what may be called the British Quarter. It lies about Abingdon Square, say, south of Fourteenth Street, and immediately east and west of Eighth Avenue.' New York TImes 18th February 1902.

Our research into the history of the British in New York revealed a long-forgotten but significant truth: there was once an area of The West Village which The New York Times called 'The British Quarter'.

More recently, Tea & Sympathy and Virgin Atlantic are no strangers to the neighborhood. In the eighteen years since it opened, Tea & Sympathy has become a local landmark, an icon for American Anglophiles, otherwise known as New York's 'unofficial British Embassy'; Virgin Atlantic had their first U.S. office on Perry Street and first drew up their U.S. business plan on a napkin in the nearby White Horse Tavern.

And yet while New York is home to Tea & Sympathy and Virgin, there is no recognized British neighborhood. Surprising for a city of Anglophiles.

Odd Corners of New York

Less known than almost any of the foreign quarters of New York is what may be called the British Quarter. It lies about Abingdon Square, say, south of Fourteenth Street, and immediately east and west of Eighth Avenue. Here you may meet with Englishmen, Scotchmen, Welshmen, and perhaps a few Manxmen, but fewer Irishmen than in most parts of the town. Signs of business houses bear a large proportion of British names and the habits of a considerable part of the inhabitants are clearly British rather than American.

Here the birthday of Burns is properly celebrated with fervor and good liquor. Here, too, English holidays are kept, and the health of King Edward is frequently toasted. Hudson Street and the lower portion of Eighth Avenue, in effect a continuation of Hudson Street, constitute the chief business thoroughfare of the quarter. The region is penetrated by many small, crooked streets, as much like old London as anything in New York. Not far away is the elbow of Commerce Street, and hard by are the curious intricacies of Old Greenwich Village.

The semi-public life of the quarter finds expression in a few small clubs and in several places of general resort. No observant person could enter one of these places without realizing that the company differed from the crowd in an ordinary New York drinking saloon. In one place especially, which is strongly representative, the barroom glitters like a London gin palace. Sporting pictures occupy, if they do not adorn, the wall. Nearly every man present has the air of a Briton. Young fellows with bristly brown mustaches and that air of innocent simplicity which decent middle-class Englishmen sometimes carry into their thirties drink half-and-half, and betray by their broad accent how short a time they have been separated from the mother country. The imported British sporting man, ruddy, grizzled, thick-necked, opinionated, and slangy, hob-nobs with the proprietor and ventures prophecies touching turf events. Now and then a visiting Briton of distinction - perhaps a titled person - is brought into the place and persuaded by means of proper drink and patriotic sentiment to forget that he is upon alien soil.

The quarter has its peculiar sorrows, for the story of British exiles in the United States, and especially in New York, is one bristling with the elements of tragedy. No class of emigrants is more helpless in the midst of the city's bustling activity than the educated Englishman without profession or technical training. He is less adaptable than the Italian or the German. Either of these makes no difficulty of working at an employment far beneath what he might have expected at home. In the case of the Italian or the German, his very ignorance of the English tongue is a protection to his pride. But the educated Englishman betrays at every sentence his bringing up, and reduced to coarse, unaccustomed employments, finds his native sensitiveness naked to a censorious world. Some such men the older residents of the quarter send to quieter communities; a few they ship to Canada; others they help to recross the Atlantic.