Words: Chris
It seems a world away now, but from 1955 until the outbreak of civil war in 1975, Lebanon was experiencing a period of glamour and optimism known as the Lebanese Golden Age. As with St. Tropez and Gstaad, Beirut and its environs attracted the European and American jet set, with hotels, restaurants, and clubs built for the purpose of entertaining the foreigners and an emerging middle-class. While St. Tropez and Gstaad were immortalised by the likes of Slim Aarons and Gunter Sachs, the Lebanese moment has been largely forgotten — blighted by the state’s ensuing war and sectarian strife.
Most of these establishments are gone forever. Others, by the will of those who own them or have inherited them, have continued to survive. Amidst a feeling of revolution and instability, I spent time visiting these places on a trip to Lebanon before the pandemic, and there remains a lot of pride attached to them. Even now, as the nation finishes celebrating its hundredth birthday, struggling with the political fallout from last year’s explosion, the pandemic, and an unemployment crisis, the Lebanese Golden Age survives in some peoples’ minds as a searing what-could-have-been. The bars, clubs, and hotels are remnants of a time when saying you were Lebanese meant another, more glamorous, thing to people in the West.
One of the most resilient of these hotels is the Mayflower in the Hamra district of Beirut – one of few to have remained open during the civil war. Founded by Mr Mounir Samaha in the fifties, today it is run by his son Sherif, who has preserved the hotel’s most curious feature: an English pub called The Duke of Wellington.
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