18/06/2026
NEWS: The UK's oldest Indian restaurant is taking the Crown Estate to court this month, as it fights eviction from its historic Regent Street home after more than a century.
Veeraswamy in Westminster, opened in April 1926 and has served guests including Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin and Queen Elizabeth II. It is even claimed that the habit of having a pint with a curry in England began at the restaurant, which now has a Michelin star.
The restaurant is located at first floor level within Sir Reginald Blomfield's grandiose rebuilding of John Nash's Regent Street Quadrant; a Grade II listed neo-Baroque set piece, designed c.1910 and completed 1920-23. The entrance is on Swallow Street, behind a rusticated semicircular arched bridge with open, giant, 3 storey Doric columned loggia.
The building is part of the vast land and property portfolio of the Crown Estate, which generates money for the Treasury and the royal family. They declined to renew the restaurant’s £205,000-a-year lease last year, saying it wants to carry out a “comprehensive refurbishment” of the offices on the building’s upper floors, which have been empty since 2023. This would involve reconfiguration of the entrance to Veeraswamy to create a larger reception area for office tenants, which would allow the estate to “materially increase” the rents it can charge.
The Guardian reported that Veeraswamy has proposed sharing the larger entrance with the office space, and also offered to match the increased rents the Crown Estate believes it could get from new office tenants. However, the estate declined.
The restaurant founder Edward Palmer was born in India in 1860, great grandson of General William and the Moghul Princess Faisan Nissa Begum. He came to England in 1880 and established "E.P. Veerasawmy & Company - purveyors of aromatic Indian spices and produce". Palmer achieved considerable success with his spice business and his profile grew after a presence at the 1924 Wembley Exhibition in London, with Veerasawmy's Indian Restaurant opening in Regent Street two years later.
Images: Veerasawmy (1,5-8); Paul Grover (2); PA (3,4); ChrisGoldNY (9)
