Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Soho
Soho's historic reputation for tolerance made it an obvious place of refuge from
dour, postwar Britain.
Jazz
and ski
e proliferated in the 1950s, folk and
rock
in
the 1960s, and punk at the end of the 1970s. London's artistic (and alcoholic)
cliques still gather here and the
media
, film and advertising industries have a strong
presence. The area's most recent transformation has seen it become London's most
high-profile gay quarter, especially around
Old Compton Street
. The attraction,
though, remains in the unique mix of people who drift through Soho. There's
nowhere else in the city where such diverse slices of London come face to face:
businessmen, drunks, theatregoers, fashion victims, market-stallholders, pimps,
prostitutes and politicians. Take it all in, and enjoy - for better or worse, most of
London is not like this.
5
Leicester Square
A short hop east of Piccadilly Circus, most Londoners tend to avoid
Leicester Square
unless they're heading for one of the cinemas. In the eighteenth century, this fairly
pleasant leafy square was home to the fashionable “Leicester House set”, headed
by successive Hanoverian princes of Wales who didn't get on with their fathers at
St James's. Busts of celebrities from those days can be found in the gardens, though
most people are more impressed by the statues of Shakespeare and Charlie Chaplin.
By night - and especially at weekends - Leicester Square resembles city centres across
the country, a playground for the drunk and underdressed.
he square has been an
entertainment zone
since the mid-nineteenth century, when
it boasted Turkish baths and music halls such as the grandiose Empire, now a cinema
that's a favourite for red-carpet premieres and, close by, the Hippodrome - designed by
Frank Matcham in 1900 - now the UK's biggest casino. Purpose-built movie houses
moved in during the 1930s, a golden age evoked by the sleek black lines of the Odeon
on the east side, and maintain their grip on the area.
Notre-Dame de France
5 Leicester Place • Mon-Fri noon-6pm, Sun 10am-6pm • Free •
T
020 7437 9363,
W
ndfchurch.org •
!
Leicester Square
One little-known sight, north of Leicester Square, is the modern Catholic church of
Notre-Dame de France
, heralded by an entrance flanked by two pillars decorated with
SOHO'S WHO'S WHO
When
Soho
- named after the cry that resounded through the district when it was a popular
place for hunting hares -
was built over in the seventeenth century, its streets were among the
most sought-after addresses in the capital. Princes, dukes and earls built their mansions around
Soho and Leicester squares, which became the centre of high-society nightlife, epitomized by
the wild masquerades organized by Viennese prima donna Theresa Cornelys (who had a
daughter by Casanova), which drew “a riotous assembly of fashionable people of both sexes”, a
tra
c jam of hackney carriages and a huge crowd of onlookers. By the end of the eighteenth
century, however, the party was over, the rich moved west, and Soho began its inexorable
descent into poverty and overcrowding. Even before the last aristocrats left, Soho had become
one of the city's main dumping grounds for
immigrants
. French Huguenots were followed by
Italians, Irish, Jews and eventually the Chinese.
For several centuries, Soho has also been a favourite haunt of the capital's creative bohos,
literati
and rebels. It was at Soho's
Turk's Head
coffee shop, in 1764, that Joshua Reynolds
founded “The Club”, to give Dr Johnson unlimited opportunities for talking. Thomas de
Quincey turned up in 1802, and was saved from starvation by a local prostitute, an incident
later recalled in his
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
. Wagner arrived destitute in 1839,
Marx lived in poverty here after the failure of the 1848 revolution, and Rimbaud and Verlaine
pitched up after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. “Such noise and chaos. Such
magnificent and terrible abandon. It's like stepping into the future”, wrote Verlaine.
