Medway Exiles Club

From Inside the Whale, George Orwell, 1940.

During the boom years, when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value...low...[there was] such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population - indeed, it has been reckoned that...there were as many as 30,000...most of them impostors. The populace had grown so hardened to artists that gruff-voiced lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without attracting a glance, and along the... banks... it was almost impossible to pick one's way through the sketching stools. It was the age of dark horses and neglected genii....

As it turned out ... the slump descended like another Ice Age, the cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished, and the huge... cafes which only ten years ago were filled till the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into darkened tombs in which there are not even any ghosts.

Bring it on.

Full text here, although it's actually about Paris, and Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller, and the above is just a small excerpt I found interesting and apposite enough to share.