Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. The UK’s oldest Indian restaurant is suing King Charles’s property business, claiming it is being forced out of its 100-year-old Regent Street home because the business doesn’t want an “Indian restaurant in [the] midst” of its “smart” new offices. Winston Churchill, Marlon Brando and Charlie Chaplin have all dined at Michelin-starred Veeraswamy in Victory House, and its chefs have twice catered for Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. It is thought to be where Britain's love of lager with curry originated, when Prince Axel of Denmark shipped over Carlsberg to have with his meals. The owners of the historic eatery are now locked in a court fight over their future with the landlords, the Crown Estate Commissioners, the managers of the property portfolio owned by King Charles. The royal estate, which generates income for the Treasury and royal family, wants to kick out the restaurant so the upper floors of the building can be turned into “high-class” offices as part of a £1bn regeneration of Regent Street. As part of the plans, the Crown Estate is opposing a bid by Veeraswamy's owners, MW Eat Ltd, to renew its lease on the property, which ran out in 2025 . The case reached court on Thursday after the restaurant owners asked a judge to rule that the Estate is “precluded from objecting to the grant of a new tenancy” under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954. They said that the only conceivable reason why such a prestigious restaurant is being forced out is that “the landlord simply does not wish its hoped-for smart new offices to have an Indian restaurant in their midst”. But lawyers for the Crown Estate insist there is "nothing remotely improper" about their bid to oust the legendary curry house. Veeraswamy was founded in 1926 by Edward Palmer, the great-grandson of General William Palmer, the secretary to the first Governor General of India, and the Moghul Princess Faisan Nissa Begum. Although centred on the mezzanine floor, it is based on several floors of Victory House, in Regent Street, which is also occupied by a basement level nightclub and a Jo Malone store. For MW Eat Ltd, Guy Fetherstonhaugh KC told Judge Alan Johns KC: "The landlord plans to carry out works to the building which it says will require the permanent removal of the tenant, but not the tenants of the nightclub or the retail unit on the ground and basement floors. "The tenant, which has just celebrated its century of operation from the building, is unwilling to leave." He continued: "The premises are very much not old and worn or ripe for redevelopment. To the contrary, they are smart and well kept, with no suggestion made that any part of the fabric requires work, save perhaps some of the windows, which are in part the landlord’s obligation to repair. "All that the landlord is now proposing to do is to carry out a limited amount of work to enable the premises to be used as offices, in order to recover a higher rent from them, thus, it says, performing its duty under Section 1(3) of the Crown Estate Act 1961 to 'maintain and enhance its (the Crown Estate’s) value and the return obtained from it, but with due regard to the requirements of good management'. "The tenant’s surmise, there being no other reason of which it is able to conceive, is that the landlord simply does not wish its hoped-for smart new offices to have an Indian restaurant in their midst, no matter how prestigious that restaurant may be. "The landlord comes close to saying this in its evidence, in relation to the spectre of its office tenant having to share the main building access with the tenant. "This would be 'inconsistent with the Commissioners’ intention to provide a high-end fitted office offering' and would not be what 'customers
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