4 Nov 2025
At the beginning of the exhibition ‘To Farse All Things’ visitors pass through a reconstruction of the entrance into the Dining Room, the vegetarian restaurant run by William English and Sandra Cross for a decade between 1980 and 1990. To celebrate the exhibition, we’ve asked some of the regular diners for their memories.
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In 1980, William English asked Andrew Czezowski, owner of legendary punk club, The Roxy, who had recently taken over the lease of an empty warehouse in London’s Borough Market, if he had a space to let to him and Sandra Cross for a café. A basement at 1 Cathedral Street became the Dining Room: an innovative vegetarian restaurant and a place for artistic collaboration. Sandra devised the ever-changing menus and did all the cooking, while William greeted diners and oversaw the front of house.
The Dining Room opened with a discreet sign above the door on Winchester Walk, with the smell of freshly baked wholemeal bread wafting up the stairs and the daily menu chalked up outside.
As sculptor, Vanessa Pooley, who worked there as a waitress, remembers, ‘To enter the place you had to go through a plain door with a simple sign saying the Dining Room on it. Straight along a little corridor and then down round narrow stairs to the basement. The door opened into a dark cave-like space with beautiful soft moon shaped lights hanging from the ceiling. It was very unpretentious and personal. The place had the atmosphere of a club with regular customers coming in… Everybody who connected with the place had a lot of personality and even when their personalities were out of the mainstream, they were embraced by Will and Sandra.”
“Everybody who connected with the place had a lot of personality and even when their personalities were out of the mainstream, they were embraced by Will and Sandra.”
Vanessa Pooley, Artist
Lea Anderson, Teresa Barker and Gaynor Coward, co-founders of dance companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs were regular visitors alongside their collaborators, including costume designer, Sandy Powell and composer, Drostan Madden. As Lea recalls Borough Market was an unusual place to start a restaurant “It was dark and deserted and Dickensian in the evenings in winter. Artist and musician David Aylward first took me to the Dining Room in 1984. I was living in Peckham at the time and had just formed The Cholmondeleys dance company with Teresa and Gaynor. I thought it was the best place to eat in London and the fact that it was in south east London was just perfect. Borough was not at all a place where people I knew went. I don’t think anyone went there except for the market.”
“I thought it was the best place to eat in London…”
Lea Anderson, choreographer and artistic director
Despite the location, the Dining Room quietly established a loyal following, and critical acclaim followed. In 1987, the Good Food Guide called their ‘menu imaginative and eclectic’. And in 1989 Felipe Figueira in What Restaurant? wrote ‘The Dining Room is reputedly the only vegetarian restaurant in London that can claim a Michelin star, but that’s something they prefer not to boast about.’ Vanessa Pooley adds, “I love, love, loved the food. Unsurpassable. I like to say that Sandra never cooked anything the same twice. That might be a slight exaggeration. Generally she just made something amazing and new every night”.
“The Dining Room is reputedly the only vegetarian restaurant in London that can claim a Michelin star, but that’s something they prefer not to boast about.”
Felipe Figueira – Good Food Guide, 1987
The restaurant welcomed a wide-ranging clientele, including experimental film maker Kenneth Anger, director and founder of the Globe Theatre, Sam Wanamaker, critic and writer Jon Savage, designer Vivienne Westwood, and pioneering lawyer Benedict Birnberg, who on occasion acted as their solicitor.
Artist Bill Burns, whom William hired as a plongeur recalls, “Many people came – it was like magic some Saturdays: Seth from Boy and Jack English and Katherine Hamnett and Vivienne Westwood and so many more. I was not long away from the farm in Saskatchewan, so this was exciting and terrifying and a sublime education. The celebrities were given the same treatment as the well-heeled solicitors, the bankrupt booksellers, Hugh de la Cruz one of the other brilliant wash-up persons who worked on a perpetual motion machine in his spare time and of course Maurice Seddon, a German aristocrat who had lost his fortune but not the sparkle. William and Sandra made the place shine – it was a beautiful thing.”
“Many people came – it was like magic some Saturdays: Seth from Boy and Jack English and Katherine Hamnett and Vivienne Westwood and so many more…”
Bill Burns, Artist
The restaurant was also, importantly a venue for artistic collaboration, hosting exhibitions, screenings, and gatherings. Film maker David Leister remembers “I actually started my film club Kino Club there but under the original heading of ‘Armchair Cinema’ which was me presenting my hand processed 16mm films with live accompaniment. I was fortunate enough to collaborate with such talented musicians and sound artists such as Aleks Kolkowski and John Wynne, both of whom produced finished soundtracks for many of my films. William and Sandra were again very supportive of me in these early days, and provided their delicious food in the intervals between my projections and ‘found’ footage presentations. Good times.”
The Dining Room closed in 1990 and remains overlooked in the histories of the redevelopment of Borough Market. The only mention being in an article published in 2000 from the journal Du Atlantis – quoting designer Ben Kelly, who commented: “There were no other artists or designers in the area, and apart from the local working class pubs and cafés, nowhere to eat or drink apart from one weird vegetarian restaurant in a basement just off the market”.
“There were no other artists or designers in the area, and apart from the local working class pubs and cafés, nowhere to eat or drink apart from one weird vegetarian restaurant in a basement just off the market.”
Ben Kelly, Designer
However, the Dining Room lives long in the memories of those who worked and dined there. As Lea Anderson sums up, ‘The Dining Room closed down at the right time as everything had changed around Borough. Times had changed. We were bereft.”
With many thanks to Lea Anderson, Bill Burns, David Leister, and Vanessa Pooley for their generous contributions.
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Thanks to Sarah Ragsdale for coordinating and gathering the responses from the contributors and for writing this post.