The haunt of royals and car dealers, gangsters and landed aristocrats, it was a fixture in London nightlife, with the most famous years of the club being the decades between 1950 and 1970.
Such watering-holes had almost all disappeared by the 1980s, when discos and nightclubs merged into the nocturnal "clubs" of those years, a situation which led up to the present-day London night-time economy.
[9] There was also The Saddle Room, which (despite the horsey-set name, aristocratic and royal clientele and off-Park Lane address) was one of the first discotheques in London, the disco trend having begun in Paris and on the Cote d'Azur.
Green appeared on television and defended King Hussein, flatly denying all of the rumours; he dismissed Miss Morris when the newspapers caught wind of the alleged affair.
[19] An account by April Ashley, a trans woman publicly outed in the early 1960s, describes the Astor of that time as having been "black tie and full of tarts".
[20] The Astor in the 1950s has been described as having been "littered with prostitutes, which the club politely called hostesses, who'd wait for a table to be filled and then order champagne for the guests at £2 a bottle (equivalent to £66 in 2023).
[21][22] It has been said that the Astor clientele was markedly more prestigious in the early 1950s than it became later, especially in the 1960s era of the Krays and others;[23] however, in 1950, long before the active years of the Krays and Richardsons, another habitué, George Ellis, had been attacked outside the Astor, slashed with a razor and the girl with him kicked into the gutter, allegedly at the behest of the woman he later married, Ruth Neilson, better known to history as Ruth Ellis, who was later to be hanged for the murder of another of her lovers.
Bertie Green, the owner of the Astor, discovered the British singer Yana, who shot to fame in the 1950s after having sung as a dare and at a private party held at the club.
In 1957, he suggested to American tennis player Althea Gibson, who had just won the Ladies' Singles tournament at Wimbledon and who had sung for fun at a private party held at the Astor to celebrate her victory, that there was a job for her if she wanted to take it (she didn't).
Indeed, when the Krays were arrested for the Cornell murder (two years after the fact), they were drinking (at 6 a.m.) at The Lion pub, Bethnal Green, intending to move on later to the Astor.