When they first heard the air-raid siren Graham Greene and Dorothy Glover were drinking in the Horseshoe Pub, a vast and cavernous bar at the southern end of Tottenham Court Road.

It was Wednesday 16 April 1941 and the 36 year old writer, who had already published ten novels, including The Power and the Glory the previous year, had been spending every night at Dorothy's Gower Mews flat for over six months now.

They both served as air-raid wardens nearby and were surprised when the siren sounded - it was only nine o’clock and the Luftwaffe raids usually began an hour later. They hurriedly finished their drinks and went to look for somewhere to eat.

A Lyons restaurant waitress, known as a "nippy" Credit: getty

They crossed the road to the huge Lyons Corner House on the corner of Oxford Street - it was usually open all night and had air-raid shelters in the basement and its own air-raid spotters on the roof.

During the war the London Lyons teashops and Corner Houses were particularly popular, especially in the mornings when very hungry people came rushing out of the shelters, many of whom had neither the inclination or the time to cook their own breakfasts. Food rationing was not applicable if you ate out.

The Corner Houses disappeared in the 1960s Credit: getty

The Corner Houses were huge restaurants, over four or five floors with each employing up to 400 staff. Each floor had an individual style, and in their heyday all had orchestras playing to diners through the day and night.

They included hair-dressing salons and theatre-booking agencies, and for a time delivered food to any address in London, twice a day. Although the restaurants looked expensive, the meals, on the whole, were within the price range of most working people.

The York Minster in 1941 Credit: getty

In the late 1960s the Oxford Street Corner House, along with eleven teashops, closed down after Lyons sold them to the Mecca Leisure Group. The closures would be ‘mitigated’, the company said, by the opening of thirty brand-new Wimpy bars - a brand-name they had purchased back in 1954.

It was the end of an era - the Lyons Corner Houses had been feeding grateful Londoners for over 60 years. But not for Graham and Dorothy that evening, at just past nine, with the air-raid sirens sounding, it was full and the doors were closed.

Next the couple tried the huge Restaurant Frascati, almost next door at 32 Oxford Street. The sumptuous and elegant Frascati’s had always been a popular place for banquets and for years the Gastronomic Society held their monthly dinner there. The last to take place was in December 1939 with the menu consisting solely of ingredients unlikely to be affected by rationing (food began to be rationed the following month). The meal consisted of Whitstable oysters, borsch soup, fillets of sole, wings of chicken with purée of mushrooms, Comice pear cooked in vanilla syrup with vanilla ice, and a savoury composed of Cheddar and Roquefort cheese with pickled walnuts. Butter was not served and saccharine came with the coffees.

Diners at Hungaria were offered a safe place to sleep, too Credit: GETTY

Unfortunately for Graham and Dorothy, the restaurant was also closed and so they walked down Wardour Street to try Chez Victor’s at number 45. The mirror-walled restaurant had opened 40 years previously and in the years before World War Two, musicians and singers such as Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson serenaded diners with Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart songs. During and after the war it lost its way a little but by the 1960s the restaurant again became the haunt of fashionable celebrities. In 2011, after 110 years, Chez Victor’s closed down for good.

Graham and Dorothy were still out of luck and the restaurant had long stopped serving. They then walked back across Shaftesbury Avenue, but this time up Dean Street to the York Minster at number 49. Yet again it was to no avail as the chef was about to travel home. The York Minster was run by a Frenchman called Victor Berlemont infamous for throwing out troublesome drinkers by shouting: “I’m afraid one of us will have to leave, and it’s not going to be me!”

Assessing the damage to the West End after a night of bombing Credit: GETTY

In time the pub came to be known as the French House (wine deliveries had been going to the actual York Minster) and during the war it was popular with what Picture Post magazine described as the ‘lower French ranks’.

It has been said that Charles de Gaulle drew up his French call-to-arms after lunch in the York Minster's restaurant upstairs but he and French officers in general were far more likely to frequent L'Escargot, the Coquille and Chez Victor.

Graham Greene Credit: GETTY

One newspaper reported that despite strict wartime food restrictions the standard of cooking in the better-class French restaurants in Soho was still pretty good, although: “Even served by a Frenchman, a leg of mutton is a leg of mutton for all that; and there is often little other choice.”

Up the road from the York Minster Dorothy and Graham at last found somewhere open at 79 Dean Street. Despite the acute wartime shortage of paprika, the Hungarian Csarda, which bravely still had plate glass windows despite the Blitz, was still managing to serve a goulash. Albeit a rather bland and colourless version.

Nearby, but perhaps a little too far in the wrong direction for the hungry couple, there was another Hungarian restaurant on Lower Regent Street. It was called the Hungaria and had the attraction in wartime London of a very deep basement fitted with gas and waterproof doors.

The waiters, some of whom slept on the premises, were trained as air raid precaution (ARP) wardens and first-aid workers. If staying the night wasn’t an option, there was also a fleet of private cars driven by tin-hatted chauffeurs ready to take you through bomb-blasts and shell-fragments back home. Their advertising during the war read “Bomb-Proof and Boredom Proof - we care for your safety as well as your Pleasure.”

Although Csarda shook from some nearby bombs, the large windows stayed intact and in his autobiographical book Ways of Escape Greene wrote that “by ten it was obvious that this was a real blitz. Left at ten thirty and walked back to Gower Mews. Wished I had my steel helmet. Changed, and went out with D, who was fire-watching. Standing on the roof of a garage we saw the flares come slowly flowing down, dribbling their flames; they drift like great yellow peonies.”

Greene reported to his fire-warden post at midnight but it was relatively quiet in his district until just before two. Suddenly, and from almost directly above, the flares came down again and landed across Charlotte Street.

A few minutes later a parachute bomb exploded above the Victoria Club in Malet Street, where 350 Canadian soldiers were sleeping. All down Gower Street bleeding people, cut by flying broken glass, were emerging from doorways in “squalid pyjamas grey with debris dust”.

The guns and bombing continued, and Greene came across a dead body “quiet and slumped and just a peaceful part of the rubble.” Another three bombs came whistling down and everyone dropped to the pavement. A sailor landed on top of Greene who now had a bleeding cut on his hand from the broken glass. He was no longer frightened - “one had ceased to believe in the possibility of surviving the night”.

Eventually Greene managed to call in at the shelter in Gower Mews where a relieved Dorothy was a warden. In the meantime another parachute bomb blew up in Bloomsbury Street and an H.E. bomb landed on the Jewish Girls’ Club in Alfred Place (more than 30 people were killed and bodies were still being removed days later). At last, at around five, after hours of chaos, confusion and noise, the continuous all-clear ‘raiders past’ siren sounded.

As far as the West End of London was concerned the terrible night of 16/17 April 1941 was one of the worst of the war. It became known, simply, as ‘The Wednesday’. It was estimated that up to 2,000 people died that night, one of whom was the popular crooner Al Bowlly.

The singer Al Bowlly Credit: getty

In bed and reading a book of cowboy stories he was killed after a parachute bomb exploded above the corner of Jermyn Street with Duke Street St James. Fame meant nothing after so many casualties and Bowlly, with his name misspelt on the death certificate, was buried ten days later in a communal grave off the Uxbridge Road.

Greene later reminisced that despite little or no sleep after that horrifying night he had to travel to Oxford the next morning to give a talk to the Catholic Newman Society. He had had no chance to shave and in Oxford went into a chemist and asked for a packet of razor blades. The man behind the counter scowled and said - “don’t you know there’s a war on?”

The Horseshoe Pub, in existence in one form or another since the 17th century and after becoming a music venue and the electrical shop Gultronics, it was demolished in September 2007. The building that has replaced it next to the Dominion Theatre is dull and unmemorable.

Where Restaurant Frascati once stood is now part of the massive Primark branch at the eastern end of Oxford Street.

Chez Victor's at 45 Wardour Street, after various Italian restaurants of no great renown, is now Peperoncino

The York Minster on Dean Street is now of course the French House and still thriving.

The Hungarian Csarda is now the Red Fort restaurant at 77 Dean Street.

Rob Baker is the author of Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics: A Sideways Look at Twentieth-Century London, and High Buildings, Low Morals: Another Sideways Look at Twentieth Century London.