ASHLAR
A supper club forty metres under Combe Down, in a stone mine that has been dark since 1912.
Reserve a place at the table
A room the city forgot.
Cut to build the terraces overhead, worked out by 1912, and left to the water ever since. The lamps are ours. Everything else was already here.
Worked 1794–1912Every wall is a day’s work.
You can read the blade in the stone — where it bit, where it slowed, and where somebody stopped for the night and never came back.
Oolitic limestone · 168 m of faceCut for a horse, not for you.
One metre ninety-three at the crown, and it is the only way through. Everybody ducks. Everybody remembers ducking.
Crown 1.93 mOne table. Thirty places.
One sitting a night, one menu, no choices. Everything you eat comes down in the cage with you, and the plates go back up at midnight.
Reserve a place at the tableAnd one square of daylight.
Twenty-seven metres straight up, cut for air in 1802. For eleven minutes around noon in June, it lands on the table.
Air shaft · 27 m
ASHLAR
−40 M
Scroll drives the camera
Move 01 · Descending dolly
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The table
Thirty places, one sitting, Thursday to Saturday.
Ninety seconds down, four hours at the table, and a lift back up into a city that has no idea this is under it.
Reserve a place at the tableThe descent
Meet at the winding house on Rock Lane. The cage takes eight at a time and the drop is ninety seconds. Flat shoes. It is 11 °C down there in every month of the year.
The sitting
Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Down at 19:30, up at 23:45. One menu of seven courses, written the morning it is cooked, from whatever came up the Avon that week.
The room
A single 18-metre table on the gallery floor, thirty places, candles and forty sodium lamps we hung ourselves. No music. The stone does not need any.
Booking
Places open on the first of each month for the month after and go in about four hours. Whole table for thirty by arrangement. No walk-ins — there is nothing to walk in to.