Sink Street – London’s “Dingy Street Inhabited by Asiatics” That Never Existed

I’ve blogged before about the old London Chinatown of Limehouse (just put ‘Limehouse’ in the search box for the site. But I’d never heard of Sink Street before – apparently a “dingy little place inhabited for the most part by Asiatics.” It appears in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, first published in 1934 and apparently also in Brideshead Revisited (though I can’t remember that reference).

Waugh describes Sink Street as being a small street just off Golden Square, near Piccadilly. The main feature of the street, apart from the Asiatics who inhabited it, was (in Waugh’s mind) The Old Hundredth which never shut, never got busted, sold liquor constantly and sounds like a lot of fun – not to mention the girls.

Of course Golden Square exists, a stone’s throw from the nightlife and entertainment centre of Piccadilly (and not far from Gerrard Street and the environs of today’s London Chinatown), but Sink Street is made up and the Old Hundredth probably an approximation of the infamous Kate Meyrick’s night-club at 43 Gerrard Street (and various other West End locations over the years).

So Sink Street sadly never existed…shame!