Soho is the area of Central London that lies to the south of Oxford Street, to the east of Regent Street, to the north of Leicester Square and to the west of Charing Cross Road. It only covers one square mile, but it’s a very colourful square mile. Here you will find jazz clubs like Ronnie Scott’s, cafés like Bar Italia, as well as artists, musicians, GLBTQ people, film companies and strip joints. Its colourful character could, however, be under threat from property development and gentrification. To get an idea of Soho’s rich history, we went to see tour guide Joanna Moncrieff, who runs Westminster Walks:
Joanna Moncrieff (standard British accent): It’s just had so many different identities: the Huguenots, but then the Greeks, Polish Jews, all different nationalities. And then that attracted revolutionaries, people like Karl Marx, and then that also attracted artists: you’ve got Canaletto, Angelica Kauffman lived in Golden Square, and then people like Mozart, but when he was a child. It’s just so many people attracted to Soho because of its previous history, and this was several hundred years ago! I mean, to me, Soho’s one of my favourite areas in London and it’s its history that makes it one of my favourites.
soho hobo
Singer-songwriter Tim Arnold was also attracted by the freedom that Soho offers. His albums include Soho Confidential and Soho Hobo and he is a founder member of the Save Soho campaign. We interviewed him at the Groucho Club, one of the area’s many fun establishments:
Tim Arnold (standard British accent): For anybody who feels a bit different, that doesn’t belong, a sense of not being able to belong somewhere, or not being welcome somewhere, Soho has always been a destination. And I think, obviously, the Huguenots, the refugees, the French revolutionaries, later on, you know, the Italian community and then, much more recently, the gay community. It’s an endless sort of turning over of people that I don’t know if it’s… maybe it’s in our DNA now because it’s happened for so long, but there’s a “It’s OK, we can go to Soho, they’ll accept us, it will be OK there.” Even my own situation. I mean, my mum’s gay, my grandmother was a midget who was performing in the circus. I’m half-Indian as well. And so I’ve been in situations, before I moved to Soho, as a youngster, that I felt… I wasn’t unhappy, but I was aware of the fact that I wasn’t quite like everybody else, and as soon as I moved to Soho, when I was 19, none of that mattered anymore, you know.
making movies
And he loves Soho’s theatrical personality:
Tim Arnold: Soho has always been a place that’s sort of overlooked the rules and regulations, not to the detriment or danger of anybody, but with a sort of friendly, knowing tolerance for people. I don’t mean criminals, I mean, there are certain places, if you run down the street with no clothes on that you probably would end up in in the back of a police van; Soho, probably not, probably everybody would applaud because it is like a film set and it’s the only film set and the only stage that, as a member of the audience, you get to be part of the cast!
madame jojo’s
The Save Soho campaign began in 2014 when one of the area’s nightclubs, Madame Jojo’s, closed. Last year the club reopened, but the Save Soho campaign goes on, and it’s certainly getting plenty of media attention:
Tim Arnold: I’m not really a political person, I’m an artist and I speak about what I feel that I see in the world and that was all I was doing and then it turned into a campaign! And I suppose it was because the co-signatories to my letter to the mayor – Boris Johnson at the time – were people that I’d worked with in the music industry and the film industry, the theatre.
Among those were Benedict Cumberbatch, who’s a dear friend, and Stephen Fry, who has become a dear friend. So with their enormous profile and attraction, you know, in the mainstream media suddenly an independent artist that was living in a bedsit in Soho was talking to the world media!