Like many English pubs, the Punch Bowl carries quite a history. The Mayfair drinking establishment first started serving ale in the middle of the 18th century, when King George II was on the throne.
Like some pockets of London, though, the two-storey tavern turned into a grimy relic of a forgotten era - the janitor did the pub's cooking and the beer was as uninspiring as the ambience.
And then film-maker Guy Ritchie bought the place. The pub's scary meat pies have since been pushed aside by organic smoked salmon, and authentic, hand-pulled British pints have replaced the modern, soulless lagers.
"I love pubs, I love pubs," Ritchie said during a recent visit to his bar as the refurbishment of the Punch Bowl was just beginning.
"Pubs just happen to be one of those institutions that are just quintessentially English, and four pubs a day shut down in the UK."
The Punch Bowl isn't Ritchie's only restoration project. The 39-year-old writer and director is also trying to breathe life into his own film-making career.
After a commercial and critical slump that included Revolver and the remake Swept Away (which starred his former wife, Madonna), Ritchie, with his new movie, RocknRolla, is returning to the genre that established his cinematic identity: the British gangster movie.
In 1998, Ritchie and producing partner Matthew Vaughn made Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a low-budget London crime caper that overflowed with kinetic visuals, colourful dialogue and distinctive heavies.
The drama grossed more than $US100 million worldwide, and two years later Ritchie and Vaughn collaborated on Snatch, which helped to further Ritchie's subspecies of stylishly violent British crime stories; similar efforts included Vaughn's Layer Cake and Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1.
But while Ritchie's honour-among-thieves movies always had exhibited a complex mix of attitude, nihilism and convoluted plotting, the combination proved caustic to 2005's Revolver, which was drubbed by critics and ignored by moviegoers.
Even 300's Gerard Butler, who stars in RocknRolla, admits he didn't see it.
"I think it's impossible for a movie like that to do well. It's an inaccessible concept," Ritchie said in a postmortem of his movie about revenge, self-doubt and philosophy, "because it's about the idea that there is essentially no such thing as an external enemy, that ultimately you are the enemy."
What Ritchie needed, in other words, was a more clear-cut story of good versus evil.
He began developing a remake of The Dirty Dozen with Matrix producer Joel Silver, and while that movie was grinding along in development, Ritchie decided he needed to get behind the cameras - and soon.
So he sent his RocknRolla script to Silver and producing partner Susan Downey, whose new Dark Castle deal allows them to make movies other than horror films (which have included House of Wax and Gothika) for Warner Bros.
"It brings to mind the other movies," Downey said of RocknRolla, "but it also advances them.
It's a return to form and an advancement of form."
Downey and Silver will produce Ritchie's first American studio film, next year's Sherlock Holmes, which stars Downey's husband, Robert Downey jun.
Butler believes that with RocknRolla, Ritchie has returned to where he excelled.
Like Ritchie's best work, RocknRolla is filled with memorably duplicitous characters: a deceitful accountant (Thandie Newton), an equal-opportunity thug (Butler), a strung-out but savvy rock star (Toby Kebbell), double-dealing crime boss Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) and his not altogether loyal aide-de-camp Archie (Mark Strong).
The setting is low-rent thuggery (although the film is largely free of Ritchie's sometimes explicit violence), but the impetus is immigration and London's rapidly evolving cultural and financial mix.
Billionaire Russians are behind a suspicious land deal, and Lenny believes he can line his own pockets along the way.
Russians and real estate are very much the news in London; oligarchs from the former Soviet Union have been buying half of all local mansions valued at more than $US30 million.
The city's skyline is dotted with construction cranes, and London will host the next summer Olympics, in 2012.
"I think there's more building taking place in the last five years than took place within the 300 years or something previously," Ritchie said.
"It's gone mad, and the labour force is mostly foreign. The place is alive."
- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
