The trouble with Soho

Conflict over noise in the West End goes back centuries

Soho is historically the heart of London’s West End, a lively neighbourhood with a sleazy underbelly. Well, not even underbelly. When I was growing up the name had a strong whiff of naughtiness, being the centre of London’s sex trade, home to numerous brothels, strip clubs and porn shops; it was also the city’s gay quarter when homosexuality was first illegal and then stigmatised, as well as the heart of the advertising industry, Chinatown and countless pubs frequented by actors, journalists and other wastrels. 

It’s come a long way from the world described by Christopher Howse in Soho in the Eighties, a time when Soho Square was home to ‘drunks, drug addicts, resting and retired prostitutes, the mentally disturbed, homosexuals looking out for others, the daytime homeless, the anxious, people waiting for the pubs to open, the sleepy, local people wanting a bit of fresh air, casual thieves’.

But as the area has become far more expensive with gentrification, so it has seen an exodus of many of its less salubrious inhabitants. In lots of ways it is much better, but it can also prove frustrating for those trying to experience its nightlife, with pubs and other venues regularly shutting their doors early (although this is a problem across central London). During lockdown the streets of Soho were closed to cars so that alfresco dining could be enjoyed but, unlike in Paris and other European cities of a similar climate, this was then reversed and the roads given back to vehicles. 

One big problem is the residents, who are not so keen on living in any sort of underbelly, and who were the subject of a recent BBC report on the families of W1. Among those interviewed were a couple with a new-born daughter, who complained about the noise and said that ‘People don't realise that people live here and bring up families here.’

This is not a new complaint, and back in the 1980s and 90s there were similar news reports, when Soho was far more inappropriate for children, with residents getting upset about the strip clubs on the school run. (I remember watching this exact same story on local news as a youngster, and thinking how exciting their school run must be.)

Nightly disturbances are nothing new to residents in this part of town. Howse recalls the earliest mention of the area when ‘Ann Clerke, “a lewd woman”, was bound over to keep the peace in October 1641 after “threateninge to burne the houses at Soho”. A similar threat, with foul language, was made, unwisely enough to a constable, by Noah Cliffe the following year. Those are the earliest known references to the place called Soho, a name supposed to come from a hunting cry in the Middle Ages.’

Modern Soho closely follows the 53 acres of the parish of St Anne, Soho, which were detached from the older parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields in the 1660s. This distinctive area came to occupy the new streets built between Tyburn Road to the north, to the east Hog Lane, now Charing Cross Road, and to the south King Street, now Shaftesbury Avenue. From the 1670s Soho Fields was developed into houses, with the first residences built on the corner of Bourchier St and Wardour St (long since replaced).

In the Restoration period King Square, as Soho Square was then known, was a fashionable address filled with gentry, nobility and no fewer than five ambassadors. A statue of King Charles II was put up in 1681, which would appear in an iconic photo of alcoholic journalist Jeffrey Bernard pictured with his head buried in his hands, taken by broadcaster and writer Daniel Farson (also an alcoholic).

‘The Soho Square of 1726 was a place of palaces, but its fashion was already waning’, wrote Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the Soho-born Victorian novelist. Already in 1748 the fencing around the garden was ‘ruined and decayed’ and by 1815 the royal statue and fountain were ‘in a most wretched mutilated state’. 

Instead of fashionable men around town, the area became home to artists, including William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, and later many writers. Thomas de Quincey lived on the corner of Soho Square and Greek Street in his ‘days of his poverty and distress’. William Blake resided in Poland Street, as did Shelley, while William Hazlitt spent his final days at 6 Frith Street, where he died, his last words being ‘Well, I have had a happy life’. 

The parish’s population grew, from 11,637 in 1800 to 17,335 by mid-century. Soho was also always foreign by London standards: in 1711, two-fifths of the new parish were French, according to Howse, a community whose only legacy is the Huguenot church in Soho Square. A fresh wave of their countrymen would follow after the revolution, inhabiting the same square where Jean-Paul Marat had also lived decades previously, writing a medical treatise. They were the dominant nationality until the last quarter of the 19 century, by which time there were also considerable numbers of Italians and, later, Maltese and North Africans. (Before the Great War, Germans tended to live further north around Charlotte Street in the area which property developers more recently failed to have rebranded Noho.)

‘By then,’ Howse wrote: ‘the English had begun their slow discovery of Soho as a place to eat. Until the founding of Kettner’s in 1868, an English face in the French restaurants of Soho was a surprise.’

As with much of central London, Soho’s residential population began to fall in the last two decades of the 19^th century, a result of the new underground, declining from 16,608 in 1881 to 12,317 in 1891 and just 2,777 by 1951 (and 2,600 today).

After the war it became exceedingly seedy, and Daniel Farson wrote of Soho in the 1950s that ‘there were no rules to be broken, because there were no rules and none of the conventions regarding money, age, class or sex which curbed the rest of Britain.’ 

It continued to attract artists like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. There was also comedy: Peter Cook started the Establishment Club, ‘London’s First Satirical Night Club’, while Private Eye set up at 22 Greek Street ‘between a striptease and a better-shop’, in offices that looked like somewhere ‘into which some gangsters had recently thrown a more or less abortive bomb’. 

Greek Street was also home to the Coach and Horses (confusingly one of three in Soho), which has occupied the corner with Romilly St since the 1720s. The victualler in 1734 was listed as one Peter Rowlandson, but more recently the Coach’s landlord, Norman Balon, was made famous by Jeffrey Bernard’s Low Life column in the Spectator. 

Almost all the figures recalled by Howse are now dead, and the world they inhabited is almost as distant as the age of Hogarth. Today Soho has been gentrified, although it has struggled to adapt in many ways, and much of this is down to the power of its residents and the Soho Society, which seeks to maintain the ‘character’ of the area.

Bars and restaurants are often blocked from extending their premises, prevented from opening late or making the smallest of adjustments. A glance at the list of planning objections by the Soho Society is to gaze deep into the heart of the Licence Raj. They objected to the Boulevard Theatre because customers might ’suffer from lack of facilities’ and go to the toilet in the streets. They objected to a jazz club soundproofing its basement in case people partied outside

They objected to the removal of a worn-down facade and the replacing of doorposts in the same style. They objected to building works in Soho Square because it would create noise between 11am and 4pm, which then ended up derelict and full of squatters.

They have repeatedly objected to restaurants being able to use the streets for diners, and objected to one extension because it would lead to ‘over intensification of restaurants in the area’. Curiously enough, for the historic gay heart of London, Pride events can’t get temporary licence because of objections. The residents group even stopped a comically ugly post-war Tesco from being demolished, pressuring Westminster City Council to designate the Dean Street store an ‘Asset of Community Value’.

A lot of this comes down to London’s political system; the West End is used by people from across the city and beyond, and yet local politicians are only responsible to a small number of voters (and not businesses, as was once the case, and is still true of the City). It might make more sense to put planning in central areas under the control of the mayor, who could establish enterprise zones where the default is that you can have as many bars and restaurants as you like (with restrictions on loud music). It’s frustrating for Londoners that an area we all use is under the veto of a small number of people.

Then again, none of this is new. St Patrick’s, the area’s Catholic church, is built on the site of a house once used by Teresa Cornelys, the 18^th century ‘Circe of Soho’ who held opera nights there. Inevitably, the authorities closed them down, the reason being that operas had to have royal licences, despite her attempts to claim they were ‘charitable’. Harassed by Georgian planning authorities, in 1771 Cornelys gave up and moved to Knightsbridge to become a ‘superintendent of asses’, as a newspaper of the time reported, and selling asses milk for a living. Heavily indebted, she died in Fleet Prison in 1797.

Indeed, one might delve even further back with this account from the old Soho parish journal, the St Anne’s Monthly Paper, of the night off August 11, 1682:

Whereas there was falsly and malitiously incerted in Carter’s Mercury, on Wednesday last, that several persons, under the notis of serenading his Grace the Duke of Monmouth, came to rib his house the last Friday nighte. The Truth whereof take as follows, viz. On Friday night, about 12 o’clock, came some gentlemen into this Square with musick. They played and song near his Grace’s house (a gentleman of her Ladyship’s retinue being one of the company), where they played and song Two Songs, the Lady looking out of the window, when, on a sudden, several Fellows (accompanied with some of the Duke’s servants), all Armed with clubs, suddenly, and without any notice given, most inhumanly knock’d them down. 

Some being (I suppose) amaz’d, made their escape, the rest desired that party of the club-men (who call’d themselves Watch-men) to carry them before a Magistrate, declaring they knew not of any mischief or affront, and protested they intended none to his Grace. The Club-men (after they had thus abused them) commanded them home. His Grace was troubled when he heard any of servants were concerned in it, being satisfied they design’d him no harm, and that it was but innocent mirth. The Lady Standford’s Gent lost a Beaver, and others lost several Silver Shells and chapes and hooks off their swords.

Today, the area’s residents use somewhat gentler methods to keep the noise down, but with Soho the war against fun is as old as the neighbourhood.