News3 July 2026 · Soho · Coach and Horses · By Sophie Ro

Norman Balon: London's Last Great Rude Landlord

Norman Balon, who has died aged 99, was one of the last men in London who could plausibly claim to be a Soho landlord in the older, awkward sense of the word. For sixty-three years he stood behind the bar of the Coach and Horses on the corner of Greek Street and Romilly Street, and for most of them he ran it exactly as he pleased. Cheap-ish beer, sticky tables, patterned carpet, no music, no menus to speak of, and behind the bar a small pugnacious man whose default posture was contempt. Everything about the place was slightly wrong on purpose, which was the whole point, because most of what was going up around it in Soho was slightly wrong by accident, or by design of a marketing department, and Balon was having none of it.

He was born on 13 January 1927, in Ilford, to a Jewish family who had already put a foot in the pub trade — his parents ran two kosher hotels in Bournemouth before the war, and in 1943 his father took over the tenancy of the Coach and Horses. Norman was sixteen, standing behind a Soho bar in wartime, and never really stood anywhere else. He would still be there in the twenty-first century, when the surrounding streets had gone through half a dozen reinventions and the Coach and Horses had gone through almost none. Somewhere along the way he decided that being rude on purpose was more honest than pretending, and once that decision was made he stuck with it for six decades.

The rudeness was, importantly, a stance rather than a mood. "I am by nature rude," he said. "I have no patience for anybody." Elsewhere: "They hate me because I tell them the truth about themselves." He had the phrase "London's Rudest Landlord" printed on his own matchboxes. He wrote a memoir called You're Barred, You Bastards. Tourists who wandered in asking for a cocktail were told there were no cocktails and to leave; regulars who overstepped were barred with the sort of theatrical relish that made barring a form of hospitality. Jeffrey Bernard, whose Spectator "Low Life" column made Balon into a national character, once remarked that Balon "couldn't punch your way out of a paper bag" — which sounds like an insult and functions, in Bernard-Balon terms, more like a compliment.

What that half-invented persona was doing, underneath, was holding a particular kind of pub in place. The upstairs room hosted the fortnightly Private Eye lunch — Richard Ingrams and staff and informants and, over the decades, whichever politicians could be lured up the stairs on the basis that cheap food and even cheaper wine tended to be followed by an indiscretion someone downstairs could use. Down at the bar was where Bernard drank himself famous while Balon watched, unimpressed. Francis Bacon was in and out; so was Lucian Freud; so were Peter O'Toole, John Hurt, Danny La Rue, Damien Hirst, various Soho gangsters, various shoplifters, various people whose profession it would have been rude to ask about. Tom Baker was a regular through his Doctor Who years — in 1978 he named the Coach among his four Soho pubs in a Sunday Times Magazine "Life in the Day," under Bernard's own byline. And the Observer later caught the exact Balon note: Baker, drinking in the Coach, accidentally stood on another customer's foot and apologised fulsomely; Balon, overhearing, barked "Oi, stop being so bloody polite!" Even courtesy was wrong. That was the room. That mix — writers, painters, criminals, actors, the odd politician, the odd drunk with nowhere to go — is the mix that Soho used to be famous for. Balon didn't curate it. He simply refused to break it up.

Keith Waterhouse's play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, based on a night Bernard genuinely spent locked in the Coach and Horses after closing time, sealed the pub in the public imagination as a specific kind of London room — not glamorous, not fashionable, definitely not clean, but the sort of place a serious drinker ended up when the fashionable rooms had run out. O'Toole played Bernard on the West End stage. Bernard himself died in 1997. It made Balon a supporting character, quietly, in a mythology he had never asked to be in. Somebody less awkward would have leaned into it. Balon mostly grumbled.

He sold the pub in 2006, at seventy-nine, and lived long enough to say publicly that selling it had been the worst mistake he ever made. In 2005 he told the Evening Standard that he was going because he could not cope with the new licensing regulations — the sort of centrally-issued rulebook that a man who had run his own room by his own private rule for sixty-three years was never going to sit down and read. His second wife Grazia, whom he married in 2007, was Venetian, from the original ghetto, and met him at a bridge club in Golders Green, which is the sort of biographical detail that sounds invented and isn't. He spent his retirement in Temple Fortune, where he lived for forty years, arguing amiably with his Orthodox neighbours about religion, of which he had precisely none. He was, in his own careful phrase, "a secular Jew" and, on the record, an atheist. He is survived by Grazia, by his daughters Lisa and Natasha from his first marriage, by his sister Doreen, by his step-daughter Julia, and by four grandchildren.

He is not, either, the only such loss of these last few weeks. Humphrey Smith: another famously awkward character in the British pub trade. The Samuel Smith's beer baron, who ran his brewery and pubs by his own equally private rule, died only days earlier, aged 81. One a Yorkshire brewery-owner in a threadbare boiler suit, the other a Soho landlord who preferred a tie — and both, in their different ways, quietly refusing to become like everybody else.

The Coach and Horses is still there, of course, on Greek Street, and it's still a pub, and by all accounts a perfectly decent one — but it is no longer Balon's pub, and hasn't been for nearly twenty years. The distinction matters more than it sounds. A room is not the same room once the person who kept it wrong on purpose has left. Modern Soho is full of places that are wrong by accident. Balon's Coach and Horses was one of the last where the wrongness was deliberate, and welcome, and completely, unshakeably his.