The innocuous green door on Dean Street in Central London is easy to miss, squeezed as it is between Aldo Zilli’s Italian restaurant and a newly opened Korean Barbecue. But step through it, climb a narrow, creaking staircase past the sign that reads “This is not a brothel” and you will find yourself in a chaotic bar only slightly bigger than an ice-cream van. Here, time is about to be called on a unique chapter of London history.

After 60 years of booze-soaked misbehaviour by the great, the good and the very, very bad, the legendary Colony Room Club will close in December because the landlord wants to turn the building into luxury flats. Three weeks from today Lyon & Turnbull will auction much of the Colony’s art collection to help to fund a move to new premises but regulars agree that the original will never be surpassed. One of the prize pieces on sale will be a mural painted by Michael Andrews in 1957 in lieu of an unpaid bar bill. Other lots include works donated by Sir Peter Blake, Gavin Turk, Matt Collishaw and Angus Fairhurst.

The club’s passing severs the strongest remaining link to the postwar glory days of old Soho, which operated for a time like an independent bohemian state, with its own conventions, morals, language and drinking hours.

The Colony was its afternoon capital, where a motley assortment of artists, writers, actors, lawyers, publishers, eccentrics, sportsmen, burglars, pornographers, politicians, labourers and wastrels drank and exchanged witticisms from lunch until the pubs reopened.

Francis Bacon held court and was paid £10 a week to bring in rich patrons, Dylan Thomas threw up on the carpet and George Melly met his second wife at the bar.

All-day drinking in pubs arrived in 1988 but the Colony survived thanks to a new generation of loyal hedonists. They included Joe Strummer and Damien Hirst, who brought his eight-day-old son along and once ran the bar for the night naked, selling outrageously priced drinks to the superstars of contemporary Brit Art.

Lucian Freud, Peter O’Toole, John Hurt, Sir Garfield Sobers, Sarah Lucas, Lisa Stansfield, Tracey Emin and Kate Moss have all been regulars over the years. “I first went in there just before I got famous,” said Stansfield, the soul singer from Rochdale who has sold more than 14 million albums since discovering the Colony. “When fame did hit, nobody treated me differently – that’s what’s so gorgeous about it.”

Today the club has 240 members, ranging in age from their twenties to their seventies and it still preserves its unique mix of household names and blue-collar characters. On a recent, typical evening the clientele included a well-known actor sitting ignored in one corner, two artists, a shoemaker, a television producer, a writer, a printer, a bar owner, a dancer with her chihuahua, a small boy in school uniform with his mother and the 64-year-old manager of a sex-toys shop.

“The atmosphere changes from hour to hour,” said Derek Cross, 68, a publisher nursing a gin at the bar in his suit and tie. “It can be arty, it can be gay, it can be intellectual, noisy or relaxed. It’s like a front room where you never know who’s going to walk through the door.”

Paul Duane, 42, a director, looked round at the upright piano, the battered banquette in the corner and the walls covered in donated artworks and fading photographs of long-dead regulars. “Everything here has been sweated on and sat on by the greatest artists and writers of the past 60 years. It should be taken to the f***ing Tate and preserved.”

Mobile phones, autographs and jokes are strictly banned, as were lemon slices in drinks until recently. Other rules are made up on the spur of the moment.

Rudeness, both fond and intimidating, is de rigueur and new arrivals receive no quarter. Everyone is expected to talk to everyone.

Muriel Belcher, the original owner, was a fierce Jewish lesbian who called all her guests “Miss”, “Mary” or “C***y” to spare her addled memory. When a bearded bore asked her advice for a fancy-dress outfit she suggested that he cover his chin in talc “and go as an armpit”.

Her successor, Ian Beard, was often cutting. Asked if he sold peanuts, he hissed: “What do you think this is? Regent’s Park Zoo?”

Michael Wojas, the current proprietor, is credited with the Colony’s rebirth. He started as a barman in 1981 and took over after Beard’s death in 1994. Dressed all in black and with the complexion of a man who has spent three decades indoors, he is determined to rekindle the Colony spirit elsewhere. But he is exhausted from fighting on two fronts: against the hard core of “Luddites” who refuse to accept that the lease is up and against the doubters who fear that the membership will break up anyway.

At 10.45pm he picked up the microphone: “Last orders please: rush up, dash up, spend up and f*** off.”

Twenty minutes later he was back, suddenly optimistic about his plans for the move: “Really, f*** off you lot. I’ve got a club to save.”

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