For the dozens of eager tourists who flocked to Soho hungry for a whiff of artistic history, the Colony Room sounded like mecca. After all, this was the home of the most famous cabal of postwar painters in Britain - artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. It was here that they met their lovers, their hangers-on and their models. Their scrappy mementoes plastered the walls. And, of course, its fabulously rude atmosphere was also famous, not least in the form of the foul-mouthed Muriel Belcher, the welcoming harridan permanently seated on a corner stool at the bar.

How disappointed those tourists must have been to creep up those dark, rather smelly back stairs and find nothing more than a virulent green room crowded with drunks and an endless queue for the single loo out at the back; everyone talking and nobody listening - that was the first impression. It was like coming across a colony of weird, deep-sea creatures glooping about in a tank of dirty green water. People dribbled rubbish into their vodka and cranberry juices (no ice; it didn’t run to such luxuries).

But, of course, that is precisely the sort of impression that the Colony wanted to give. It didn’t cater to the voyeuristic trade. It was more like a private party and, if you persisted, you would soon get the point.

It was the Brit Pack that invigorated it in its latter days, that anarchic gang of hardheaded hedonists who found a tiny refuge from corporate London, with its bland, Blairite ethos. They were prepared to put their money where their mouths were and tried to support it with fundraising evenings and auctions. But, alas, to no avail.

Now it is being dismantled, the tattered souvenirs of more animated days auctioned off. The tourists who were not welcome may not mourn its passing but the misfits who took refuge there will have lost a spiritual home.

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