Porn king’s son behind licence application for Slug premises

The son of an English pornography publisher and property magnate is behind a recent premises licence application for The Redback at Fulham.

Howard Raymond and his cousin Mark Quinn are the directors of Ilona House Investments, the company that in April applied for a licence to sell alcohol and provide late night entertainment on The Redback premises.

Howard’s father Paul Raymond, who opened the first strip club in the UK to show full-frontal nudity, was among the nation’s richest men and had an estimated £650m fortune at the time of his death in 2008.

The elder Raymond owned soft-porn magazines including Men Only and Escort, and built up a large property portfolio in Soho that included Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. He was played by Steve Coogan in The Look of Love, a 2013 movie about his life.

Paul Raymond was said to dote on his granddaughter Fawn Ilona James, who inherited part of Raymond’s property holdings. Last week, she and her sister were listed fourth on The Sunday Times’ ‘40 richest people under 40’ list with a net worth of £750m.

Ilona House Investments purchased the freehold on 490-492 Fulham Road – the property on which the Redback is located – in 2014, for £3.3m.

It leased the property first to Stonegate Pubs and then to The Redback’s most recent proprietor, RedCat Leased Pubs Limited (RCLP), in 2021.

RCLP went into administration earlier this year after it was unable to meet its obligations, resulting in The Redback’s closure.

The pub, known to Imperial students by the name Slug, was popular for its Wednesday student nights, but failed to recover from a post-pandemic slump that hit footfall on other days of the week.

Howard Raymond and Mark Quinn did not respond to a request for comment.