The great fire of London

Where is everybody going to party now Chiltern has gone?

- JOE BROMLEY

It’s the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre!” came the shrieks from 2ml-full lips and clingfilm skin, as videos of the beloved Chiltern Firehouse, engulfed in flames on February 14, spread across WhatsApp like the 21st-century equivalent of the 1666 inferno.

Demi Moore was told her party of 12 would have to seek shelter — and supper — elsewhere. Other loved-up diners shivered in their furs and Aquazzura stilettos on Chiltern Street's pavement as 125 firefighters and 20 engines tackled the blaze.

For approximately half a second, people chuck- led at the insane irony of it all. Between 1889 and 2005 the Tudor-gothic red-brick building had been an actual fire station. Then 2013 saw owner André Balazs and developer Harry Han- delsman convert it into a 200-capacity restau- rant, 26-suite hotel with an impossible-to-enter sprawling private bar and lounge area that made it the sole candidate for the most exclusive club (that does not run a membership scheme) in London. Its gatekeeper David Macdarra was one of the most influential people in town. Anyone caught sneaking into the exclusive area via the lifts was mercilessly hurled out the back door, with the bins and paparazzi.

The cruellest twist, perhaps, is that guests leav- ing the Firehouse — at 4.30am, give or take an hour — would all walk past a TV monitor playing fake CCTV footage of a fire blazing through the building. Last month, when a burning log fell from the pizza oven, the inferno was real.

Now the grim reality of two (or more) years without Chiltern’s inside-outside smoking area settled in, giggles have turned to gawking. Where will its regulars — read: the most rich and famous people in the world — go in London now?