Wendy Richard meets the Handlebar Club

THIS column will get a sweaty reputation with the way you find it reflecting on London’s lost pubs so often.

When it comes to the Windsor Castle in Marylebone, Harrington only visited once or twice – maybe for some once was enough.

You didn’t have to be a raving royalist to drink there but it helped, with its wall to wall pictures of the Queen and her well-combed relatives.

It was like a museum of village green Britain with china bric-a-brac and tankards hanging from hooks, and a sentry booth outside where a life-sized red-jacket kept guard.

There were proper ales for sparrows who had done a hard day’s work, and this ambiance was assisted further by the regular appearance of national treasure Wendy Richard, the Are You Being Served? sweetheart who graduated into Pauline Fowler off of EastEnders. She sat in her favourite chair with her pet dog by her feet.

Then just when visitors thought it must be chips for tea or at least some jellied eels sent over from Stepney, the menu broke character and offered a Thai Kitchen meal.

The sad sight of the Windsor Castle boarded up for nearly a decade

Yes, this wasn’t any ordinary pub, especially if you had a grand moustache, about which we will come to in a moment.

Whether the regalia was your thing or not, the pub has been shut up for nearly a decade. You can just about see the shadow of the old sign out front.

Property deals of all sorts have been rumoured since the last landlord retired and the pub closed in 2016, but nothing has got off the ground.

Neighbours recognise that the site has become a bit of an eyesore in Crawford Place, but that doesn’t mean they think Westminster City Council’s planners should accept any change of use.

It’s why a heap of objections on their desk are currently being looked at, standing as they do against the latest developer proposal to switch it to a 17-room hotel. Residents say this will change the neighbourhood, draw in a more transient use with visitors that have no stake in the conservation area or daily life and that, deep down, they wish it could be a nice little battle cruiser all over again.

A decision on planning permission is due soon.

Amid the letters and appeals for a rethink, there is no correspondence from the surviving members of the Handlebar Club, but you can bet they will be keeping a close eye on what the final verdict is.

This was its meeting place for decades and brought together men who have – to quote the official qualifying criteria – “a hirsute appendage of the upper lip, with graspable extremities”.

The guard box that once stood in Crawford Place

Beards were frowned upon, by the way.

On the first Friday of every month they would take up a reserved table at the Windsor Castle and sup pints together, admiring each other’s length and curl.

TV stations from across the world would come and interview them about their love of looking like, well… a cross between a retired brigadier and a dumbfounded bobby from a Sherlock Holmes short story.

The club’s online annals have wonderful reports of darts matches with their own Moriarties, sworn rivals the Pipe Smokers Club, over in Holborn. Matches would come to a tired end when nobody could hit a double on the outer ring. One game went awry when a new-fangled electronic scoreboard was used but couldn’t record arrows which didn’t hit the board.

When the Windsor Castle closed down, the club followed bar staff to The Heron in Norfolk Crescent, where a handlebar moustache remains part of the bar’s branding.

Wendy Richard, meanwhile, is remembered with a blue plaque not in the pub where she used to hold court, but at the Chesterfield Arms in Mayfair. Her parents had run that bar when she was younger and it was called the Shepherd’s Tavern.

Its modern form sums up how so many London pubs are all about the food these days, rather than the handlebar moustaches and a peppered dartboard

Chicken Kiev dinners cost around £25 and chips are past the fiver mark.

The city has changed.

The locals around Crawford Place accept the Windsor Castle won’t be coming back either, but they are allowed to wish that it would.