Soho

• 1. Introduction

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  Soho sits at the heart of London's West End, roughly one square mile of streets that have housed aristocrats, Huguenot refugees, jazz musicians, cholera victims, sex shops and film studios, all within the same few blocks. The name itself dates to around 1636, drawn from an old hunting cry. James Scott, the 1st Duke of Monmouth, shouted it as a rallying call at the Battle of Sedgemoor on the 6th of July 1685, half a century after it had already been attached to this patch of London. That compression of time is very Soho. Things arrive, layer on top of each other, and almost nothing fully disappears.

  What shaped this square mile into something so different from the grand estates that surround it on every side? Why did the earls and dukes who planned it as the next Mayfair end up leaving it behind? And how did a neighbourhood that was once the most densely populated and disease-ridden corner of London become the address of choice for film companies, music studios, and Michelin-starred restaurants? The answers reach back to a royal land grab in 1536, run through a cholera pump handle removed in 1854, and arrive at a nail bomb on a Friday night in 1999.

• 2. From Royal Park to Parish

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  Henry VIII took the land in 1536, turning farmland that had belonged to the Abbot and Convent of Abingdon into a royal park for the Palace of Whitehall. The Crown's hold proved looser than expected. Queen Mary sold around seven acres in 1554. Most of the remainder was sold off between 1590 and 1623. A two-acre section lingered in royal hands until Charles II sold it in 1676.

  By the 1660s, ownership of what was then called Soho Fields had passed to Henry Jermyn, the 1st Earl of St Albans. Jermyn leased 19 of the 22 acres to a man named Joseph Girle, who quickly passed the whole arrangement to bricklayer Richard Frith. Frith began building in earnest. Soho Square was laid out in the 1680s on the former fields, and by 1691 there were 41 completed houses around it. The square was originally called King Square in honour of Charles II, with a statue of him at its centre.

  The area was formally carved out as a parish in 1687, when St Anne's was established to serve a population that had outgrown St Martin in the Fields. That new parish stretched from Oxford Street in the north to Leicester Square in the south, from what is now Charing Cross Road in the west to Wardour Street in the east. St Anne's Church on Wardour Street was built between 1677 and 1686, possibly to a design by Sir Christopher Wren or William Talman. When a V1 flying bomb hit the building in 1940, the tower survived. It was restored and formally reopened by the Princess Royal on the 12th of March 1990.

• 3. Immigrants and Aristocrats

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  Richard Graham, the 1st Viscount Preston, and Edward Howard, the 2nd Earl of Carlisle, were among the upper-class families who moved into the new Soho Square. The Earls of Leicester and Portland had intended the whole district to become a prestige estate on par with Bloomsbury, Marylebone and Mayfair. It never worked out that way.

  From around 1680 onward, immigrants began arriving. French Huguenots came in particular numbers after 1688, giving Soho the character of a French quarter. The historian William Maitland wrote that the parish "so greatly abound with French that is an easy Matter for a Stranger to imagine himself in France." The French Protestant Church of London, constructed in the Flemish Gothic style, has occupied Nos. 8-9 Soho Square since 1893. It remains the only church of its kind in the city.

  Other communities followed across the centuries. Greek and Italian immigrants arrived and opened small restaurants in the 19th century. Chinese Londoners, many moving from Poplar, settled along Gerrard Street during the 1950s, attracted by cheap rents. By 1970 the street had become the recognised centre of London's Chinatown, pedestrianised and decorated with a Chinese gateway and lanterns. Karl Marx lived at No. 64 Dean Street around 1850. Thomas De Quincey moved into Greek Street in 1802 after running away from Manchester Grammar School. William Blake lived at No. 28 Poland Street from 1785 to 1791 and wrote Songs of Innocence there.

• 4. The Pump on Broad Street

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  By 1851, the population of Soho had reached 327 inhabitants per acre, making it one of the most crowded places in London. Houses had been divided into tenements. Overcrowding brought disease, and disease brought a defining moment in the history of public health.

  In 1854, a cholera outbreak swept through the neighbourhood. A physician named John Snow mapped the addresses of the sick and noticed a pattern: they were overwhelmingly people whose nearest water source was the public pump at the junction of Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) and Cambridge Street (now Lexington Street). Snow persuaded the authorities to remove the handle from the pump, stopping people from drawing its contaminated water. The spring beneath was later found to have been polluted with sewage.

  The episode is now considered one of the earliest examples of epidemiological reasoning applied to a real crisis. Science writer Steven Johnson later noted that almost every building on that street that stood in 1854 has since been replaced. A replica pump, without its handle as a reminder of Snow's intervention, was erected nearby in 1992. The outbreak had one more consequence for the neighbourhood: the remaining upper-class families who had held on through the earlier decline now left for good, and six hospitals were built in Soho between 1851 and 1874 to cope with the health emergency that remained.

• 5. Music, Clubs, and Coffee Bars

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  Club Eleven opened in Soho in 1948 and is generally recognised as the first place in the UK where modern jazz, or bebop, was publicly performed. It lasted only until 1950, when it was closed following a drugs raid. That abrupt ending is almost emblematic of how Soho's music scene operated: venues opened fast, burned bright, and closed just as fast, but the scene they fed kept growing.

  Blues guitarist Cyril Davies and Bob Watson opened the London Skiffle Centre on the first floor of the Roundhouse pub on Wardour Street in 1952, London's first skiffle club. The first coffee bar, Moka at No. 29 Frith Street, was formally opened in 1953 by the film star Gina Lollobrigida; the frothed coffee produced from stainless steel machines was genuinely new in British culture at the time. The 2i's Coffee Bar, one of the first rock clubs in Europe, began at No. 44 Gerard Street in 1956 before moving to the better-known address of No. 59 Old Compton Street.

  Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club opened at 39 Gerrard Street in 1959 and moved to 47 Frith Street in 1965. The Marquee Club on Wardour Street hosted early performances by the Rolling Stones in July 1962, and by The Who in late 1964, along with Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, AC/DC and Iron Maiden. Trident Studios at 17 St Anne's Court was established by Norman and Barry Sheffield in 1968. The Beatles chose to record several tracks from The White Album there because its facilities were judged better than those at Abbey Road. Queen recorded their first four albums at Trident. The studio also recorded David Bowie, Elton John, Free and Thin Lizzy before closing as a general recording facility in 1981.

• 6. Sex, Vice, and Reform

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  Between 1778 and 1801, No. 21 Soho Square was occupied by the White House, a brothel described by the magistrate Henry Mayhew as "a notorious place of ill-fame". The sex industry had deep roots in the district, and by the 1970s its scale had become extraordinary. From 1976 to 1982, Soho contained 54 sex shops, 39 sex cinemas and cinema clubs, 16 strip and peep shows, 11 sex-oriented clubs and 12 licensed massage parlours.

  In 1960, the first sex cinema in London, the Compton Cinema Club, opened at 56 Old Compton Street as a members-only club to circumvent the law. Its owners, Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, later produced two early Roman Polanski films, including Repulsion in 1965. The growth of this industry was fed in part by corruption inside the Metropolitan Police. Officers from the vice squad were simultaneously policing organised crime and accepting bribes from it. That changed when Robert Mark was appointed Commissioner and began rooting out the corrupt officers. Local residents had already formed the Soho Society in 1972 to push for reform. A series of corruption trials followed in 1975, and several senior police officers were imprisoned.

  Paul Raymond had begun buying freeholds in Soho around this time, taking advantage of the depression in property values the trials caused. By 1982 there were 185 sex industry premises in the area. By 1991 that number had fallen to around 30. By 2000, the combination of tighter licensing, changed social attitudes, and the spread of internet access had reduced the visible red-light trade to a small zone around Berwick Street.

• 7. Film, Comedy, and the Gay Village

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  Twentieth Century House in Soho Square was built in 1937 for Twentieth Century Fox. De Lane Lea Studios opened in Soho in 1947 and is now owned by Warner Bros. The British Board of Film Classification, formerly known as the British Board of Film Censors, has had its offices in Soho Square since 1950. Research commissioned by Westminster City Council in the 2010s found that 23 per cent of the Soho workforce was employed in the creative industries.

  The Raymond Revuebar at No. 11 Walker's Court, opened by Paul Raymond in 1958, played an unexpected role in British comedy. By 1980, the upstairs space had been adopted as a comedy club called The Comic Strip by a group of alternative comedians including Rik Mayall, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Alexei Sayle and Adrian Edmondson. They went on to wider recognition with The Comic Strip Presents on Channel 4. The Windmill Theatre on Great Windmill Street, which had opened in December 1931 and claimed to be the only London theatre that stayed open throughout the Second World War, had earlier launched the careers of Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards and Tony Hancock.

  Old Compton Street is now recognised as the centre of London's most prominent gay village. The Admiral Duncan pub on that street was damaged on the 30th of April 1999 by a nail bomb planted by David Copeland, a neo-Nazi who was carrying out a series of bombings aimed at stirring up ethnic and homophobic tensions. Three people died and 30 were injured. In 2005, Elton John held a joint bachelor party at the Soho Revue Bar on Walker's Court with his longtime partner David Furnish, ahead of their civil partnership.

• 8. Streets That Carry History

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  Dean Street was built in the 1680s and its French immigrant settlers were followed by a long line of notable residents. The Colony Club, founded by Muriel Belcher at No. 41, ran from 1948 to 2008 and was frequented by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Frith Street was named after the bricklayer Richard Frith who developed much of the area; a plaque above the stage door of the Prince Edward Theatre marks where Mozart lived as a child between 1764 and 1765; and at No. 22, John Logie Baird first demonstrated television in his laboratory in 1926.

  Great Marlborough Street was named after the military commander John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. The Marquess of Queensberry's libel trial against Oscar Wilde was heard at the Marlborough Street Magistrates Court in 1895. The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were tried there for drugs possession in 1967, with Brian Jones facing similar charges a year later. On Great Windmill Street, the Scottish anatomist William Hunter opened his anatomical theatre at No. 16 in 1766 and ran it until his death in 1783; Karl Marx laid out the principles of The Communist Manifesto at a meeting in the Red Lion pub on the same street in 1850.

  Poland Street was named after a pub called the King of Poland. William Blake lived at No. 28 from 1785 to 1791, writing Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel there. The first multi-storey car park in London opened on Poland Street in 1934. Adjacent Denmark Street, the so-called British Tin Pan Alley, is where the Sex Pistols lived beneath No. 6 and recorded their first demos. Elton John wrote "Your Song" on Denmark Street, and Led Zeppelin held their first rehearsal in 1968 in a basement studio on Gerrard Street.