When Archie McNair moved into 128 King’s Road, Chelsea, in the early 1950s, it was a social and retail desert, the only nearby shops a tobacconist and a confectioner. Deep Chelsea still felt like the London artists’ bohemia it had been for a century. Locals toddled in their slippers to buy their daily bread from Mr Beaton’s Victorian bakery.
McNair, who has died aged 95, said, long afterwards: “I just felt in my guts that the King’s Road was going to take off.” He became its entrepreneur, creating four businesses crucial to the Chelsea set, the earliest of the youth-based London style tribes. He set up a photographic studio at 128, with a team including Antony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon), and opened the Fantasie, London’s first espresso bar outside Soho, on its ground floor. He knew half his neighbourhood, including a wild young couple, Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Greene (known as APG), lately let loose from Goldsmiths art college, and helped them invent Bazaar, her fashion boutique at 138a. In its basement, he and APG established Alexander’s restaurant.
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