Why 1994 was the year that shook Britain
From Mod haircuts to bomber jackets, the 1990s are deeply fashionable right now, but one year in particular is gonna live forever-ah… 1994; the year Oasis released their debut single Supersonic, Jeff Bezos invented Amazon, Pulp Fiction premiered, Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour party and St John turned bone marrow into haute cuisine.
Founded by chef Fergus Henderson and restaurateur Trevor Gulliver, St John will mark their 30th anniversary this Autumn. To celebrate, today the restaurant serves the first of its “back to 1994” menus, with 30 year old prices. Diners at the London restaurant will feast on roast bone marrow and parsley salad for ￡4.20, rather than the 2024 price of ￡16. While apricots on toast, another classic, will cost ￡3.70 (as opposed to ￡10.20).
There will be St John merch on sale just like a rock gig. Though, sadly, all the tables were snapped up “in a nanosecond” when they went live, Gulliver admits. The joke among his young chefs is that even Oasis can’t get in. So, most of St John’s fans will have to dine out on memories.
But, what memories. When St John opened in 1994, on the site of an old smokehouse in Smithfield Market, it changed London dining forever, and ignited a new spirit of optimism.
Its logo was a humble pig – in Fergus’s words, the “quintessential nose-to-tail animal” – with a chunky Times New Roman typeface. The menu was concisely written on a single sheet of paper and staff wore white smocks (in homage to the market porters at Smithfield). Henderson’s stripped-back cooking style was a game-changer, leading to a new wave of restaurants embracing modern British cooking.
I was 32 in 1994 and working as a sub-editor on Homes & Gardens magazine. As a comprehensive school girl, I didn’t fit in with the chintzy set but nor could I keep up with the cool kids who saw Primal Scream and Pulp at Reading ’94. It was still very much the era of ecstasy and “superstar DJs”.
I was terminally uncool. But restaurants, oh I could do restaurants. And when a friend took me to St John, it was love. Growing up in the West Midlands, going to a Berni Inn was a thrill. Then, arriving in London, Pizza Express – with its cheery Pop Art decor – became my fix. But St John was a church of minimalism, with its open kitchen, white walls, concrete floor and stainless steel bar.
“The 80s were all about elaborate surface decoration. And along came St John, very pared-down, like a French bistro with its dark furniture and cream walls, as a way of purging that excess,” recalls arts writer Dominic Lutyens. All the YBAs (Young British Artists) came to St John, from Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas to Damien Hirst. So did the city boys who worked nearby.
And the food was off the scale; roast bone marrow and parsley salad, crispy fried pig tail and eel, bacon and mash. Until then, offal wasn’t exactly fashionable. As a non-meat eater, I survived on celeriac. But I got high on the atmosphere – and the all-French wine list. Best of all were the democratic no-spill glass tumblers.
Judicious all-day drinking was indulged (Fergus famously enjoyed an elevenses of Fernet-Branca with seed cake) and Hirst often slept off a hangover at the chef’s house.
“St John was part of an extraordinary renaissance, a welling-up of enthusiasm and talent and can-do-ness,” says Jennifer Sharp, former restaurant editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Though dining on rook, shot specially for her, was a little too extraordinary: “I needed a Dunkin’ Donut to take the taste away.”
Back then, the location wasn’t desirable. “Smithfield market was on its uppers, there were no 1990s superclubs like Fabric,” recalls Gulliver. “Just a curry house, now the site of the Elizabeth Line station, and two brothels.”
Britain, led by John Major’s government, was recovering from economic downturn, but the London map was changing fast. “I was working on the Architects’ Journal in 1994, and our office was in Clerkenwell,” says arts journalist Marcus Field, “St John became a second office. The recession meant very few large buildings were being built. But this left space to write about younger architects. St John immediately became a gathering place for these people as Fergus had trained as an architect and they were his friends. The new crew of YBAs were also regulars because Clerkenwell was a place full of cheap studio space.”
It wasn’t the only big London restaurant launch that year. 1994 was also when Oliver Peyton opened The Atlantic at Piccadilly, says design editor Caroline Roux. “The red plush bar, Dick’s Bar, stayed open until 3am. It was all artists, designers and fashion people – very sociable and extremely messy.”
But St John represented an axis shift from West to East London, says Lutyens. “In the 1970s and 80s, bohemian creatives like David Hockney and Cecilia Birtwell were based in West London. By 1994, my friends and I were hanging out at Maureen Paley’s East End gallery. Lucas and Emin set up their shop in Bethnal Green selling affordable artworks,” he recalls. “People were very entrepreneurial.”
Fearless innovation was applauded. “In 1994, the National Lottery was about to start funding projects like Tate Modern. It was a showcase for Zaha Hadid, another Clerkenwell architect, who won a competition to design the Cardiff Bay Opera House. It felt like such an exciting time,” says Field.
The industrial aesthetic was everywhere, says Lutyens. “A bare light bulb, or objects you could buy off the peg in hardware stores, were suddenly the inspiration for designers. And that went along with a new youth movement. Obviously, the later Blair government was gay-friendly, and people coming over from Eastern Europe meant Britain became more multicultural.”
There was a new glamour to architecture, previously seen as a bit tweedy, says property editor Janice Morley. “There were a lot of sleek modern buildings going up. But architects were also getting real about function and designing flats to cope with young people’s busy lifestyles.” Roux points to new breakthroughs in furniture design: “Ron Arad, who ran the product design course at the RCA, was getting attention for his curvy D-sofa, made in stainless steel, and his Bookworm bookcase, produced by Kartell.” Both designs launched that year.
So, was 1994 the apotheosis of the meaty, brave, anything-can-happen energy in pop culture that we’re missing now?
In fact, we’d just survived a crisis. Britain was forced to leave the ERM in 1992, two years after joining. Black Wednesday cost the UK Treasury ￡3.3 billion. That had followed a housing market crash (caused by a rapid increase in interest rates, a recession, and overvalued property prices). But it actually meant young people could buy flats.
My 1994 salary at publishers IPC was ￡18,000, but five years later I bought a tiny maisonette in Peckham for ￡103,000. We never felt rich. But we never felt as poor as we do now. There was more social mobility and meritocracy, says John McTernan, who became a political adviser to Blair in 1994, and is also a St John fan (he logged on to book the 1994 menu but failed to get a table).
“It was the year the largest single class in Britain became the white-collar, monthly paid worker,” he says. “And obviously social change leads to political and cultural change.”
Even the success of a film like Four Weddings and a Funeral saw us laughing with, and at, the hapless punk-posh set (which is why that 1994 film has aged better than the later Love, Actually).
Significantly, Absolutely Fabulous, the great fashion satire, moved from an (edgy) BBC 2 slot to (mainstream) BBC 1 in 1994, with Elton John and Lulu fighting for cameos. The TV audience now understood the jokes about buying ridiculous chairs and wearing Lacroix. We were all design literate now.
Platonic friendship was another big 1994 theme, from the first series of Friends to the touching bromance in The Shawshank Redemption – and Uma and John Travolta sparring in Pulp Fiction. While “Protection”, a collaboration between English trip hop collective Massive Attack and Tracey Thorn, gave birth to, arguably, one of the great pop lyrics: “I stand in front of you/ I’ll take the force of the blow, protection/ You’re a boy and I’m a girl/ But you know you can lean on me.”
“It was a contradictory time,” says design podcaster Grant Gibson. “I graduated in 1994. On one hand, there was a recession – my friends and I left university with little expectation of finding a job. However, there was a sense of optimism. I remember being distraught when Labour leader John Smith died in May 1994, but Blair brought a generational shift in British politics that chimed with the flourishing of the YBAs and Britpop. Briefly, it felt like my generation was going to change the world through guitar-based rock. The city was transforming in front of our eyes, but it was possible to have a good night out on a budget. How things have changed.”
“I knew John Smith because I joined the Labour Party in the same Edinburgh branch as him as a teenager,” says McTernan. “A whole future was lost when he died. There would have been a very different approach to a Labour government. I can’t see John Smith inviting Oasis into Number 10. It was a huge decision to skip a political generation and jump to Tony as leader, and his ability to speak to middle Britain.”
“I can relate to 1994,” says social commentator Peter York. “It was absolutely tremendous in every way.” Then, York was living and working near St John, with its clientele of “new sector people”, creatives and management consultants. The fresh 90s design aesthetic – “we were getting into full mid-century modern admiration in interiors; people were building shops and restaurants which were ‘modernistical’” – told him John Major’s government would soon be over.
“A whole area which had been meat and metal, old London, was changing. We were tired of Tories. That period was very exciting, because if you were culturally sensitive, you could see the signs of change. We’re talking about Major, of course. Now I’ve come to love him, but then he was the Spitting Image joke and we all laughed at him, in that snobby way.”
York had no time for “ostentatiously Mancunian” Oasis, but when he was introduced to Blur he found them to be decent southern art school boys, “which I liked”. Then, Peter Mandelson introduced him to Tony Blair at a big party at the Grosvenor Hotel, telling him beforehand this would be the next Labour PM. “Tony was a very polite, credible and smiley young man.” He knew Mandelson would be running the world behind the scenes “so he must be right”.
Certainly Blair, then 41, in his Paul Smith shirts (“a disruptor brand”) was part of a new generation. “We all thought Tony Blair should have been in the Conservative Party,” says Morley dryly, “but he saw a way of being more positive and outgoing. And that did reflect on what we were doing at the time. I know I had more money in my pocket.”
In fact, it was Margaret Thatcher who had changed the direction of growth in the capital from West to East – with the growth of the Docklands – as McTernan, now a political commentator, reminds me. “There was an act of will to change the face of London to move it eastwards. So, in its way, St John restaurant opening in Clerkenwell is like the first farmers homesteading on the Great Plains of America. Today, all workers in their 20s live East.”
Barriers around class and sexuality were also breaking, adds Marcus Field. “As a gay man of 27, I still found it difficult to be confident about my sexuality at work. So the motion brought that year in parliament by Edwina Currie to lower the age of consent from 21 to 16 felt like a big moment for me. I remember listening to the Commons debate on the radio in February 1994 and hearing Tony Blair’s passionate support for the motion [he was shadow Home Secretary then] and thinking ‘He’s good, I like him’. The motion was defeated, but positive change was coming.”
The nuclear family was changing, too. Sarah Ferguson had bolted from Prince Andrew. Princess Di appeared in her Revenge Dress at a 1994 dinner at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens after the televised admission of adultery by her husband Charles.
“In standup [comedy], intelligent women were talking about their sex lives, or divorce or being a single parent,” says Helen Lederer (who played Catriona in AbFab). “It was a sea change from the gilded cage of the sitcom written by men, where you were the girlfriend or mistress.”
Not everything was quite so edgy. After the crash, there was also an appetite for chocolate box musicals. “1994 really was an abundant, golden time in the West End, it was like stepping back into the MGM era. In those shows no one dies, it was good old-fashioned entertainment,” says actress Ruthie Henshall who had back-to-back leads in Crazy for You and She Loves Me (she and her co-star John Gordon Sinclair received matching Oliviers in 1994). “I’m so glad I came into the business when I did. It was about this amazing pool of talented musical theatre people. We didn’t have to find a TV name to sell tickets.”
Fashion also got a shot in the arm. Punk queen Vivienne Westwood raided historical fashions, parodying English looks with her innovative take on traditional tailoring, tartan and Harris Tweed. While Alexander McQueen, the East End son of a cab driver, brought in a dark gothic aesthetic with his corsets and “bumster” trousers. 1994 was a key year for McQueen. In October, he staged one of his most influential shows, The Birds, at Bagley’s disused warehouse in King’s Cross. “My shows are about sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” he is quoted as saying, by biographer Andrew Wilson. “It’s for the excitement and the goose bumps… I want heart attacks. I want ambulances.”
But there was darkness too. McQueen, who came out as gay in 1994, had grown up in the shadow of Aids (Leigh Bowery and Derek Jarman both died of Aids in 1994). “In musical theatre, we were losing all these beautiful boys,” says Henshall. “We started West End Cares, putting on shows in our spare time to raise money.”
Is it even worth singling out one year of that decade? Sharp thinks the big events of 1994 didn’t get started until the autumn. “It’s like the 1960s, which actually started in 1967.” McTernan thinks the seeds were already planted in 1994 for everything that came afterwards. “To quote science fiction writer William Gibson: ‘The future’s here already. It’s just unevenly distributed’.”
Whether 1994 was radical in the same way that 1967 was is debatable. On July 5, 1994, Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos from his garage in Bellevue, Washington as a challenge to bookshops. Now it’s an online marketplace for “stuff”. “If Amazon sees your ‘thing’ selling, they offer an Amazon copy of it,” sighs McTernan. Meanwhile, east London’s skyline is now crowded with skyscrapers such as the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater. Be careful what you wish for.
So while we dine like it’s 1994, that’s worth remembering. But back then, reviewers made restaurants not influencers. “There was no cult of fame,” Sharp reminds me. “It was about imagination and verve and talent.” She’s just sorry it remained mostly London-centric and didn’t roll out to the rest of the country.
Part of the fascination of that year is you had to be there. No selfies remain (and precious few photos). The internet only got going in 1994 – before that it was the preserve of hackers and geeks – so the best images are burned on your retina.
By contrast, we can expect an outpouring of selfies at St John from this week, as diners boast of having landed a seat. For Gulliver, the three week 1994 menu is a way of thanking staff – “the force that is St John” – and the customers who have been coming for 30 years. “Anyone can have a party.”
His financial director was initially horrified at the suggestion. “He lay down on the floor and stayed there.” Drinks will remain at 2024 pricing, or they’d go bankrupt. But it’s a point of pride that St John is independent (it hasn’t been bought by venture capitalists). They’ve retained their Michelin star and Fergus was awarded an OBE in 2022.
The menu still changes twice a day in a world of burgers and shots. When seasonal produce finishes, they “find the joy” in something else. Though they’re now having the tumblers specially made (the French manufacturer ran out).
There will be an “alumni party” this month with Fergus present (his Parkinson’s is too advanced for him to do interviews now) and well-known chefs who trained at St John. But there won’t be too much pomp, as Gulliver stresses: “No one is famous at St John. Even the very famous – a footballer, politician, actor – all have the right to quiet enjoyment.”
