Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
5
bohemian landmark, where the most popular drink is Ricard, and they only serve
beer in halves. Opened by a German as the
York Minster
pub, it was bought by a
Belgian, Victor Berlemont, in 1914, when the German owner was deported, and
transformed into a French émigré haunt. Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan were
both regulars, and during World War II it was frequented by de Gaulle and the
Free French forces.
Soho's most famous Jewish immigrant was
Karl Marx
, who in 1850 moved into two
“evil, frightful rooms” on the top floor of no. 28, with his wife and maid (both of
whom were pregnant by him) and four children, having been evicted from his first two
addresses for failing to pay the rent. There's a plaque commemorating his stay (with
incorrect dates), and the waiters at
Quo Vadis
restaurant below will show diners round
the rooms on request (
T
020 7437 9585).
Wardour Street
A kind of dividing line between the busier eastern half of Soho and the marginally
quieter western zone,
Wardour Street
is largely given over to the media industry.
Just north of Shaftesbury Avenue, there's a small park laid out on what used to be
St Anne's Church
, bombed in the last war, with only its tower now standing - the
ashes of Dorothy L. Sayers, who was a churchwarden for many years, are buried
under the tower.
Brewer Street
West of Wardour Street, along
Brewer Street
, the sex industry has a long history and
retains a foothold. It was at the
Windmill Theatre
, on nearby Great Windmill Street,
that the famous “Revuedeville” shows, featuring static nude performers (movement was
strictly forbidden by the censor), were first staged in the 1930s. The shows continued
pretty much uninterrupted right through World War II - the subject of the 2005 film
Mrs Henderson Presents -
eventually closing in 1964
.
Meanwhile, back on Brewer
Street, the
Raymond Revuebar
opened in 1952 as a “World Centre of Erotic
Entertainment”, finally succumbing, in 2004, to competition from the slick
lap-dancing clubs
that now prevail.
SOHO VICE
Prostitution
is nothing new to Soho. Way back in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, prince and prole alike used to come here (and to Covent Garden) for paid sex.
Several prominent courtesans were residents of Soho, their profession recorded as “player
and mistress to several persons”, or, lower down on the social scale, “generally slut and
drunkard; occasionally whore and thief”.
Hooper's Hotel
, a high-class Soho brothel frequented
by the Prince of Wales, even got a mention in the popular, late eighteenth-century book
The
Mysteries of Flagellation
. By Victorian times, the area was described as “a reeking home of
filthy vice”, where “the grosser immorality flourishes unabashed from every age downwards
to mere children”. And it was in Soho that Prime Minister Gladstone used to conduct his
crusade to save prostitutes - managing “to combine his missionary meddling with a keen
appreciation of a pretty face”, as one perceptive critic observed.
By World War II,
organized gangs
, like the notorious Messina Brothers from Malta,
controlled a huge vice empire in Soho, later taken over by one of their erstwhile henchmen,
Bernie Silver, Soho's self-styled “Godfather”. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sex trade threatened to
take over the whole of Soho, aided and abetted by the police themselves, who were involved
in a massive protection racket. The complicity between the gangs and the police was finally
exposed in 1976, when ten top-ranking Scotland Yard o
cers were charged with bribery and
corruption on a massive scale and sentenced to prison for up to twelve years. (Silver himself
had been put inside in 1974.) The combined efforts of the Soho Society and Westminster
Council has enormously reduced the number of sex establishments, but, with the rise of the
lap-dancing club, the area's vice days are not quite over yet.
