art and design  Saving Bacon's bacon  A tiny, grimy drinking den
frequented by artists and poets from Francis Bacon to Damien
Hirst is under threat of closure. Euan Ferguson calls for a
reprieve  Like all good art, it challenges preconceptions. Read
up on the Colony Room, and the words 'squalid' and 'rude'
feature often, along with a sense of dirty reverence for the
past, of old stagers pretending to recall the night Francis
Bacon held Dylan Thomas's coat for him while he threw up on
Colin MacInnes (or whatever): a Soho dinosaur redolent of, lost
somewhere in, a drunken Fifties haze.  But. Another word which
crops up is the fiercely incorrect 'legendary'. Unlike unicorns,
this place definitely exists. A tiny door, a green corridor, a
buzzer. Buzz, and get in - and not that many do, and not that
many would truly want to - and you enter a place which, for all
the years of art on the walls, is very much of 2008: one small,
green, cluttered, delightful, rearguard action, fighting mad
laws and pantywaist orthodoxy