Tony Ganio remembers growing up in Romilly Street, family life in Seven Dials, and a working life among Soho’s record shops and clubs.

By Tony Ganio

None of us choose where in the world we are born, so I do consider that I was very lucky to have been born in England, especially Central London, and with a maternal family that were very caring, as well as a great father – of Italian and French heritage.

I only realised later in life that having spent the first 8 years in Soho and then having lived, worked and played between Covent Garden and Soho into my mid-twenties that this was a great education and helped me to develop a certain self-confidence and an ability to be comfortable in people’s company from many different backgrounds and cultures.

Home in Romilly Street

So my first eight years were spent in a one-bedroom flat with my parents in 19 Romilly Street. I have some vivid memories of the flat but really cannot remember the bathroom! I believe that we used the landing as food storage and probably did not have a fridge, as the milk used to be put on the window ledge.

Childhood at home. From Tony Ganio’s collection.

My mother is more present in my memory from this time, as I assume my father was out in his taxi. He started driving a cab post-war, having worked in kitchens in places such as the Savoy in the 1930s. Many French and Italians would work in restaurants, hotels and the catering industry always striving to work, even in menial positions, in named establishments for future good references. He started cabbing – black taxi – at the end of the war. Again he had a very strong work ethic very similar to my mother’s family.

A childhood street photograph from Tony Ganio’s collection.

A family street photograph from Tony Ganio’s collection.

Family in Monmouth Street

I imagine that we visited my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother more or less every day, as they only lived 300 metres away in Monmouth Street. So Cambridge Circus, Earlham Street and Monmouth Street are imbedded in my memory.

The walk down Monmouth Street went past a funeral parlour called French – now in Lamb’s Conduit Street. Then there was a very odd small run-down tobacconist managed by a foreign lady. She was known as Mad Lena for the reason that she was unfortunately not very together and would scream and shout. Next door there would be a bomb site. Then there was this antique/junk shop run by an Irish lady called Mrs Pussy. My grandmother would give me vinyl 78 discs to take there so that I would be given some money. And next door was Mon Plaisir run by the Vialli family since 1945.

An Xmas party was a huge tradition instigated by my great-grandmother which would take place at 19 Monmouth Street. Some would stay over and I vividly remember the cigarette smoke making my eyes sting.

A group outside the Nag’s Head. From Tony Ganio’s collection.

Shopping and Street Life

The trips to Oxford Street are also memorable – M&S, BHS, C&A – Woolworths and stores where the cash would be put into small containers and fly around the store in mini tubes.

We would vary the streets to access Oxford Street – Wardour Street where there were many film companies – Dean Street where the stained glass in Quo Vadis would frighten me – Ramillies Place with giant steps.

The food buying trips were also interesting. Berwick and Rupert Street markets were both extremely busy and colourful with fresh fruit and veg, as well as many other items.

Camisa, Lina Stores and Parmiagani on Old Compton Street had all the necessary Italian ingredients. I still smile when I eat in Randall and Aubin as I have vivid memories of the sawdust on the floor and the central cashier where one paid, on many visits with my mother.

There was a fresh fish shop opposite Randall and Aubin as well as one in Romilly Street. The butcher in Brewer Street was huge – this was pre-Bifilco in Old Compton Street.

The fresh fish shop opposite Randall and Aubin. Photograph: Robert Stallard, Soho ’73.

The fish stall. Photograph: Robert Stallard, Soho ’73.

Another trip out would be to buy cigarettes at Coleman Cohen in Old Compton Street – the owner Harold was a very good friend of the family, and in fact would come on holiday with us. We would stop off at the dairy in Frith Street – Mr Pugh a Welshman, and buy cakes normally from Mme Bertaux. Going past Kettner’s would be good as the commissionaire would normally give me a coin of some type, finishing off at Manny’s the fish shop on the corner of Romilly Street and Frith Street where I would have cold chips and milk in the basement.

The dairy, Frith Street. Photograph: Robert Stallard, Soho ’73.

Coleman Cohen Ltd advertisement, naming Mr Harold Coleman and giving the address as 42 Frith Street.

The walk to Regent Street would be along Shaftesbury Avenue where there were and still are numerous theatres. I believe that the Mousetrap, in the other direction, towards St Martin’s Lane, started its run 1 or 2 years after I was born and is still running.

There was already the odd Chinese restaurant with dragons in the window – very noticeable as a child. Cecil Gee the men’s clothes store had a large entrance off the pavement with a bird aviary which was always memorable. Weiss was a high class lingerie shop which my father used to deliver stock to their Golders Green shop twice a week. The shop was no more than 80 metres from our flat, so I would be constantly spoilt by the lady assistants that worked in the shop when I walked past with either of my parents.

School Days

My father organised for me to go to a French Catholic school run by French nuns called Notre Dame in Leicester Square. He was very keen for me to learn French from an early age.

Leicester Square. From Tony Ganio’s collection.

He had spent some of his first years in Hyères, France and apparently when he returned to London, he did not speak English. The language spoken at his parents’ home was French, and my father did not speak Italian.

Lycée Notre Dame would use the church in Prince Charles II Street and had access to it via the back of the school. I was christened at St Giles in the Fields as a Protestant so the Sisters at the school were doing my father a favour allowing me to attend, as his family were Catholic and I believe that they knew my French grandmother.

I am sure that I was not damaged at the school but I do remember not being allowed to go to confession as I was not of the correct faith. I do remember that it was emphasised that one went to hell and was damned if one did not confess. Also at the end-of-term choir I was obliged to mime as I am tone-deaf and my singing is very poor. The Sisters who ran the school were very strict. There was a flower girl at the front of the school called Maureen Kelley whose family were well known to my maternal family and in later years she owned the Sun Tavern in Long Acre.

My walk to school was via Dean Street or Greek Street, so we would walk along Gerrard Street which was just starting to be known as Chinatown – apparently the Chinese from Hong Kong settled there post-war as the area was very cheap at that time. Similarly the Italians and French had settled in Soho during the preceding 100 years due to the cheapness of the area!

There was a great bakery on the corner where we would buy a baguette and I would nibble on the end and deny it was me!

There was one Italian restaurant at the end of Gerrard Street called Peter Mario, whose daughter married a boxer called Henry Cooper. There was also a huge post office right in the middle. So at that time, the Chinese had arrived but had not taken over all the street.

You would come across at least 3 or 4 bomb sites along this very short route – one was where the fire station is now and another where there is the Curzon cinema.

Nowadays Gerrard and Lisle Street are a hive of activity with Chinese eateries everywhere. Lisle Street and Newport Court, at this time were mainly occupied by vinyl shops selling either American imports or second hand albums.

After school I would pass by Phoenix Gardens, at the time a bomb site, which is behind St Giles’ Church, and use the playground. At that time you could walk from Old Compton Street into New Compton Street by just crossing Charing Cross Road.

Neighbours, Restaurants and Days Out

I believe that my father would park his cab outside the flat but at some time he would use Lexington car park which is still there. I remember the huge rickety lifts with concertina shutters.

Every year there would be a Soho fair which took place on a bomb site nearly opposite the French House. This fair has been resurrected, including the famous waiters’ race.

At our flat there was a drinking club on the ground floor run by 2 sisters who lived in Frith Street. The first floor had a man called Garibaldi, and I can only remember seeing him in his bed. We were on the second floor and the third floor had a couple of gay men who would take me out to the park and I even remember a trip to Littlehampton with them. Apparently they ran a transvestite club in Wardour Mews that my parents did go to occasionally – this all took place in the fifties.

At that time homosexuality was a crime, but looking back it seemed to be fairly commonplace in central London.

The year that we moved, Mario and Franco opened one of their first restaurants on the ground floor – La Terraza. They were very well known at the time and Mario was a friend of my father. Many Italians who worked in London went through their “school” at some time. See the book called The Spaghetti Tree, which I have a copy signed by Mario.

Mario and Franco’s La Terrazza, on the corner of Romilly Street. Photograph: Robert Stallard, Soho ’73.

The restaurant was so well known that Frank Sinatra ate there on one of his trips to London, and on leaving the restaurant went past Soho Records and the window was full of his album covers. He wanted to meet the owner, who happened to be Alex Strickland, a friend of my father. They then struck a good friendship and every time Alex opened a new shop there would be a telegram from Frank, Dean, Sammy and the Rat Pack.

It just shows what a small world it was then.

Another great memory was going to the Oasis – open-air swimming pool with friends of the family as well as relatives. The pool is still there but redeveloped as again there was a bomb site next to the original. One day walking down Oxford Street my mother saw a knitting pattern with a photo of me on the front. This had been taken on one of the trips to the Oasis.

Pakolor colour-film promotional cover. From Tony Ganio’s collection.

Another swimming pool, indoors, is still located in Marshall Street just off Carnaby Street. I remember going there with the school.

And then there was Hamleys, our local toy shop.

Family Life and Lasting Memories

At my great-grandmother’s I do have memories of the steel bath being brought out before she had a bathroom. This may mean that we didn’t have a bath at ours in Romilly Street. There were definitely two outside toilets at Monmouth Street prior to the bathroom being converted, as I can vividly remember torn up newspaper pushed on to a hook to be used as toilet paper.

Childhood companions. From Tony Ganio’s collection.

My great-grandmother would love a bottle of Guinness and have a bet on the horses, watching it on TV which had only started around 1955. Prior to then, she would go greyhound racing. At the time of betting from home she would use the Keeleys – an Irish family with interests in flowers and porters’ barrows to place her bets. I always remember that she would listen out for the letterbox rattling two floors down, and the saying – “Son, go and get my winnings, I think I heard them downstairs.” And if she had had a good day on the horses, she would always share.

All in all, life was very cosmopolitan with people from all walks of life. Many different languages were spoken in Old Compton Street and I do have memories of a black man called Prince Monolulu who would walk the streets of the West End offering tips on horses and recounting stories to children.

Betty and Joan are cousins of my mother and were very good in looking after me in these formative years. The cinema trips to cartoons were very frequent and when I was 11 she took me to see Guns of Navarone at the recently built Curzon.

A family photograph from Tony Ganio’s collection.

We would also stop off at Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons. One could buy seeds and they would flock on to your arms and hands. I can still remember the horrible feeling of their claws on my skin. How things have changed!

On walking into Soho even now, I feel a spring to my step, especially having a drink outside the French House, a coffee in Bar Italia, shopping in Lina Stores and eating in Randall and Aubin. The French House is yet another place that I can remember, playing in the cellar as a very young child with the family of Gaston. I am also sure that we would have eaten in L’Escargot as a family in the 50s. Now that a dear friend, Brian Clivaz, is the owner, we eat there very often. I even got married there in August 2020.

Working in Soho’s Record Shops

Record shops in the 1960s were a relatively new phenomenon and most neighbourhoods had at least one or two shops. I have a book called Going for a Song which details decade by decade how the industry evolved. During the 1960s and 1970s, there was Alex Strickland with approximately 12 shops, Musicland, HMV, Our Price, Harlequin, Virgin, One Stop and various independents in Soho.

Soho Record Centre window display advertising a personal appearance by Tony Bennett.

Alex had been brought up either in Soho or Holborn – his father had a tobacconist in Coptic Street and then in Wardour Street. He was very friendly with Harold Colman whose family had the cigar/tobacconist in Old Compton Street. I am unsure how my father met them, most likely when he was living in Old Compton Street and buying his cigarettes. Apparently Alex started selling records in the back of the shop in Wardour Street and as this was successful he opened Soho Records in approximately 1960 on the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street. The shop had record booths where you could listen prior to purchasing and also had glass counters so that you could see that the assistants were super careful in their handling of the discs.

Soho Record Centre carrier bag bearing Alex Strickland’s name and the address 60 Dean Street.

I understand that the second shop was in Golders Green and he then opened several over the next few years – Cheapside, Ludgate Hill, London Wall, Queensway, Coventry Street, Victoria, King’s Road, Barnet…

Initially I worked in Harrow on Saturday and during school holidays until the summer of 1966, when I then went to Old Compton Street. I absolutely loved it – the hustle and bustle of the area, going to get coffees in Amalfi, seeing Harold in the cigar shop, Mr Pugh in the dairy and Tony in the newspaper shop across the road. It was as if I had never left Soho. I loved music, was very customer-focused and worked hard. I noticed that most of the men that worked in the shops were gay, including the general manager, but this never affected any part of my working there.

Soho Record Centre, Dean Street. Photograph: Robert Stallard, Soho ’73.

In fact now and again, some of the customers, male, would try and hit on me, and I would let them know that I wasn’t that way inclined. So considering this was prior to legalisation in 1967, it does seem odd looking back that it was quite open.

I worked most of this time in Soho and would fill in for some days at other branches when they were short-staffed. Alex was very hands-on when he ran the company and was very demanding with the staff. We got on really well. When King’s Road opened in 1967, I moved down to there with a friend from school, Paul Jones, and spent the next year working there on Saturdays and filling in elsewhere during school holidays.

Monmouth Street, 1966.

At this time I was still living and at school in north London, working on Saturdays in Kings Road.I still spent time going out in Soho at weekends at places such as Les Enfants Terribles, Macabre and the Batclan which was in Hanover Square.

The summer of 1968 I left school and lived in Paris on and off for 3 months. On returning back to London I needed to find some work having decided not to follow a career in accountancy.

I managed to find a position at One Stop Records in South Milton Street which was owned by a previous general manager of Soho Records. At the time this was the hippest record shop in London with USA imports arriving before any other shop had them in London and was well known to radio and club DJs

Our regular clients would be John Peel, Steve Winwood, Mick Jagger, David Puttnam – film director – Peter Sellers – actor, and many others. I stayed for a few months, only because my father was insisting that I get a serious job and was looking out for me. At the same time Richard Branson was starting Virgin records but to keep the peace at home I finally took a job helping out in a company that imported fresh produce from the Canary Islands. This contact came from a great aunt – Mary who cleaned their offices. This job was Monday – Friday and I continued at One Stop Records on Saturdays.

Danny Baker, the comedian, worked at One Stop a couple of years after me.It had been a wrench for me to leave there full time but at least I still had my Saturday position which continued for the next 18 months. My highlights were delivering records to Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland at their home in Mayfair, and visiting Faye Dunaway in hospital with presents from Sellars. Every Saturday was a great pleasure.

La Poubelle, Greek Street, 1969–70.

In 1969, I was always in various clubs in Soho and working in One stop Records, so was always bumping into the same people. I was offered a job DJ one night a week in La Poubelle Greek Street – it was enjoyable but only lasted a few months as I fell out with the owner, Louis Brown. He owned about 12 clubs across London. One night he complained about my music, and as it was my birthday I told him what I thought of his taste, so next week I was not wanted. Two weeks later I started one night a week in Lulus Kensington, another of Louis Brown club – this lasted 2 months, and I then spent a year at La Valbonne in Kingly Street. Yet another club of Brown. This one was very upmarket with a swimming pool on the first floor. I had a Sunday night spot which lasted over a year. So at that time, work involved the importing of fresh produce, selling and spinning records – a great variation and good fun!

I had a good relationship with my parents but at that time it was fairly easy to move out and find a bedsit. I moved in with a girlfriend for a few months at a relatively young age. It didn’t work out and my father suggested that a good solution would be to move in with my grandmother in Monmouth Street, Seven Dials – above Mon Plaisir restaurant. She had a three-floor house and lived there alone. So there I was living in top floor 2 room space in Monmouth Street – working in Covent Garden and going out in Soho !

Long Acre, Covent Garden, c.1970.

Covent Garden Market moved in 1974, I changed jobs in 1975 to be close to the market and moved out to West London but still would visit Soho to go to York Minster – as it was called then – Bar Italia,Angelucci, record shops and clothes shops.

My sons were brought up in south west London, and I would always take them to Central London- Slam city skates in Neal’s Yard – Forbidden Planet in Shaftesbury Avenue and various other locations. They both still frequent the area often, one of them even renting a pied a terre in Soho.

I am a member of the Snail Club in Greek Street, eating there often. I am also involved with Soho Housing Association as well as a member of the Soho Society. So the tradition my grandfather started over 100 years by moving to the area continues, and the area still has a huge attraction for me.

Under the Counter: The Rise and Fall of Soho’s Adult Shops

When we think of today’s Soho, it’s all cafés, expensive eateries, boutique shops, and overpriced hotels. But for much of the twentieth century, these same streets were home to Britain’s illicit pornography trade, with shops selling magazines, photographs, and films “under the counter.”

Holywell Street, near the Strand, was infamous in Victorian London for selling erotic literature.

The trade didn’t begin in Soho. In Victorian London, Holywell Street near the Strand was notorious for selling erotic books. Even after its demolition between 1900 and 1902, the business simply moved west, first to Charing Cross Road, and by the 1940s into Soho.

Soho made sense. It already had a reputation for sex work and tolerance, plus its maze-like streets provided ideal cover for criminality, with shopping streets like Oxford Street and Regent Street feeding steady custom.

“The Long Shop”, 51a Old Compton Street — one of Soho’s earliest known ‘fronts’.

By the 1950s, a handful of bookshops traded openly, selling relatively innocent books in the front while hiding stronger material in backrooms. Access to this inner sanctum was guarded and granted only to trusted customers. Here, harder stock would often be kept in suitcases, ready to be closed and whisked away in the event of a police raid at short notice.

Early bookshop operators included John Hawksford, whose Modern Books at 48 Dean Street had a notorious backroom, and Tom Fletcher’s “The Long Shop” at 51a Old Compton Street, where a young carpenter called Ronald “John” Mason began working. Mason is said to be Britain’s first millionaire pornography distributor, running at least nine shops by the early 1970s.

Ronald “John” Mason — widely described as Britain’s first millionaire pornographer.

The trade flourished thanks to a system of corruption. Permission to open a shop was effectively controlled by gangster Bernie “The Godfather of Soho” Silver, while the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad collected bribes disguised as a “licence” to operate.

The licence offered limited protection — advance warning of police raids and, most importantly, the ability to do business without arrest. This arrangement ensured stability: shopkeepers and pornographers paid up, the police turned a blind eye, leaving the underworld to regulate. Suddenly, Soho became the centre of Britain’s porn economy, if not Europe’s.

“Rollers”: short hardcore 8mm films that became must-have items in the 1960s Soho trade.

New products drove the boom. “Soho postcards” — packs of five explicit photos — were cheap to produce and sold in their thousands. Hand-typed “Soho Bibles”, a combination of erotic book and Soho postcards, could yield profit margins of 80 per cent.

From the mid-1960s, “rollers” — short hardcore 8mm films — became the must-have item, selling for the equivalent of several hundred pounds each today. The trade attracted colourful figures. Ron Davey, known as the “Millionaire Dustman,” pioneered the postcard and Soho Bible business, while Evan “Big Jeff” Phillips was revealed by the British tabloid press as “Britain’s first blue film millionaire”.

The trade continued to grow, as smuggled imports from Denmark — the first country to legalise all pornography — flooded Soho.

Soho bookshop frontages in 1970, as the trade moved from “bookshop” fronts toward explicit sex retail.

By 1970, Soho had 52 sex shops, up from just five in 1955, with another 35 across London. Jimmy Humphries, who entered the trade in 1969, quickly built a chain of eleven shops.

The profits were extraordinary: one shop was said to gross £10,000 a week, and The Longford Report (1972) estimated the illicit “hard pornography” trade at £10 million a year.

Eventually, the popular press exposed the police corruption that enabled the pornographers to flourish, leading to a major crackdown across Soho and in the London Metropolitan Police Force.

Taboo: John Lindsay’s explicit shopfront style set the tone for Soho in the 1970s.

With all the key players either arrested or laying low, Soho’s porn trade was up for the taking. A new breed of young entrepreneurs filled the gap. David Sullivan — later to own West Ham football club — built his empire on mail-order scams and a nationwide chain of Private Shops, sparking a moral panic about softcore pornography spreading beyond Soho.

The opening of the first Ann Summers shop in September 1970 had the most impact. Unlike the clandestine bookshops, Ann Summers — named after the secretary of founder Michael Caborn-Waterfield — presented itself as a sex shop, selling a range of sex-related products.

Soho’s bookshops now realised that they could move away from using the “bookshop” alibi and become sex shops, clearly indicating to customers what was for sale.

Now, neon-lit, explicit displays left little to the imagination. The Holloway family led the charge, with American pornography distributor Reuben Sturman, the so-called “Walt Disney of Pornography”, bankrolling them. Others changed their shopfronts to compete, such as John Lindsay’s Taboo shop. Maltese operator Charlie Grech took over Jimmy Humphries’ empire, controlling dozens of Soho shops by the late 1970s.

Community groups, especially the newly formed Soho Society, campaigned against the sheer number of shops and their increasingly graphic window displays. Politicians were alarmed by the spread of sex shops into suburban high streets.

The result was increased regulation. The Indecent Displays Act 1981 banned open displays and forced shops to black out their windows. The following year, the Local Government Act 1982 introduced licensing.

Westminster Council acted quickly, capping Soho’s shops at 10–20 (down from 62) with licences costing £5,000. By 1984, only six shops in Soho were licensed. Raids, prosecutions, and rising costs soon took their toll.

What had once been Britain’s most concentrated red-light district was in sharp decline. Some shops closed, while others returned to being bookshops, ensuring that they stocked no more than 15% of sex-related materials to circumvent the law.

Walker’s Court today: redevelopment, luxury, and controlled nostalgia.

Empty premises were snapped up by developers. As Leslie Hardcastle of the Soho Society later reflected, the real danger wasn’t the sex trade itself, but what followed its decline: the march of “corporate man.” Campaigns to regulate the trade succeeded, but also accelerated the arrival of global brands and rising rents, displacing those who live and work in Soho.

By the 2000s, hardcore was finally legal to sell in licensed shops, but the internet had already changed the game. Today just a handful of licensed shops survive in Soho, most selling toys and lingerie rather than books and films.

Soho’s sex shops may be gone, but they shaped the area’s identity for half a century. Their story reminds us that cities are defined not only by their legal economies but also by hidden ones. In the case of Soho, it was an illicit trade that flourished, was tamed, and then replaced — leaving behind the question of what kind of place Soho should be.

Oliver Carter is Professor of Creative Economies at Birmingham City University. He is the author of Under the Counter: Britain’s Illicit Trade in Hardcore 8mm Pornographic Films.

His Not Safe for Work blog can be found at www.under-the-counter.com. He is keen to hear from those who can share memories of Soho’s pornography trade.

Charles Booth's Poverty Map and what it tells us about late 19th Century Soho.

As the London School of Economics revamps and expands its Charles Booth Poverty Map website, Sarah Wise reveals what the Booth survey tells us about late 19^th-century Soho.

On 15 May 1888, one year before publication of the first volume of his Life and Labour of the People in London survey, Charles Booth gave a lecture to the Royal Statistical Society, revealing his investigative team’s preliminary findings on the living conditions of the 909,000 inhabitants of East London. At the end, Booth expressed the desire that somebody would undertake the same investigation for the other areas of London.

Charles Booth's 1889 Poverty Map showing West Central London, including Soho.

In Booth’s audience was Robert Valpy – barrister and West End charity campaigner. He took up Booth’s challenge, and with a team of philanthropists and youth workers, Valpy spent the summer of 1888 creating a 27-page micro-survey of Soho and St Giles-in-the-Fields.

Valpy had a survey population of 113,000 – just one-eighth of Booth’s East End total. Keeping to Booth’s methodology, Valpy concluded that while there was a smaller percentage of people living in chronic poverty in West Central than in East London, nevertheless, those who were experiencing precarious employment or unemployment endured deeper poverty than their counterparts in East London.

Soho rents were significantly higher than those charged in the East End, he pointed out, with 6 shillings affording a three-room lodging in the East but just a single room in Soho.

Soho is a 1680s development, which had by the mid-18th century fallen on hard times and remained so throughout the 19th. Regent Street had been built in the second decade of the 19th century specifically to segregate Soho from wealthy Mayfair. A phenomenon that still frustrates today is that there are few access points into and out of Soho to Regent Street. But Mayfair has twice as many entrances, and broader ones. It was designed like that, to encourage Mayfair and discourage Soho!

Crosse & Blackwell pickle/sauce factory, Charing Cross Road.

The district was dominated by small-scale workshop manufacturing but there were also a number of large firms operating in ‘heavier’ industries, such as glassworking and gun-making, and big breweries and food-processing plants. One of the largest factories in the district was RW Wilson, a tin-plate works on a huge site between Wardour and Dean Streets. Soho was additionally noted for piano and organ manufacture.

Hat Factory, Hollen Street.

One of the reasons that, towards the end of the 19th century, people believed the East End was poorer than ‘Up West’ was that as well as being a hard-working part of town, Soho had become, as historian Judith Walkowitz has put it, ‘the bureaucratic centre of empire, the hub of communications, transportation, commercial display, entertainment and finance... A modern landscape constructed of office buildings, shops, department stores, museums, opera, concert halls, music halls, restaurants and hotels’.

Soho and St Giles also experienced the breaking up of concentrated communities of the working poor with the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue and widening of Charing Cross Road (these opened in 1886 and 1887 respectively); most notably the total loss of the Five Dials (where Cambridge Circus is today) and Newport Market (Charing Cross Road ploughs right through its site). Thousands of people were displaced as their small homes were demolished for the new roads.

Later, the population decline in Soho, between the Censuses of 1881 and 1891, was 20%, with Soho losing over 9,000 residents. This shrinkage was second only to the population fall in the Square Mile itself, which took place for broadly similar reasons.

One-quarter of the 42,000 residents of Soho and St James’s worked in the tailoring trade, and almost half of that one-quarter could be described as “poor” or “very poor”, according to the methodology used by Charles Booth and adopted by Robert Valpy. The fashion houses of Regent Street, Bond Street and Oxford Street, and the bespoke gentlemen’s outfitters of St James’s, had been shifting from in-house workshops to outsourcing manufacture via middlemen. This resulted in a drop in wages, as home-based workers undercut each other to secure orders. The brightly lit shopping streets of the West End were contiguous to slum streets where the produce was manufactured.

On Charles Booth’s Poverty Map, the two dominant colours within Soho are pink, which signified ‘working-class comfort – steady regular earnings’; but also purple – a funny old designation, which was a mixture of poverty and small businesses, being home to a broad range of incomes. One distinction Booth made was that purple streets featured ‘large houses that were no longer inhabited by the class they were built for.’ You see this mentioned a lot with regard to West Central London – that the working poor of the West were often to be found living and working in what had formerly been the most aristocratic part of town. In the late 19th century, certain houses had china plaques upon them commemorating that they were once the home of such luminaries as poet John Dryden (in Gerrard Street) and artist Joshua Reynolds (in Leicester Square). The Duke of Grafton’s Southampton House in Bloomsbury Square was now subdivided up and inhabited by the poor; the former library of Charles I, subsequently a prayer room in the time of Cromwell, was now an industrial school and night refuge. The ghostly presence of the Stuart and Georgian elite is more palpable in writings about Soho, Covent Garden and the Strand district in the late 19th century than it was in the East.

 

There are also smatterings of ‘black’ on the map: Soho was a place of ordinary street villainy, such as you would find more famously in the East. From the Booth police notebooks we have this snippet, from Constable Dunn, on Turner’s Court, just off St Martin’s Lane: ‘The worst spot in the sub-division... Has had many fights with the inhabitants; a policeman’s throat cut three months ago. A bad class of rough living here. Lower-class market porters and costers.... thieves but not prostitutes living here.’

In one of the last volumes of Life and Labour, this account of life in Soho in the 1890s is given – in highly coloured, not to say bigoted, language: ‘It is indeed a strange, outlandish population with which the churches and missions attempt to deal, and its social diseases are varied and numerous. Not only have we the criminal and outcast, the utterly vicious and the hopelessly drunken, the veriest refuse of London life, together with a low class of casual labour; not only have we the harlot and those who facilitate and live upon her trade; not only the unwholesome conditions of theatrical employment and the occupations which depend on the London season; but here are gathered together every kind and description of foreigner…so that Central London as a whole is in some ways as completely cosmopolitan as it is in others curiously insular and self-contained. We hear of instances in which five languages are spoken in one house, but as a rule the people of each nationality seem to select some particular street as their own… There is an army of hotel and restaurant waiters, shop assistants, theatrical employees and printers – the poorest are the odd-job men, market porters, hawkers, sandwich men, flower sellers and widows dependent on char-ring and office cleaning. There is a colony of Jewish tailors round Broad Street in Soho. Prostitution, pursued largely by non-residents, may also be considered a regular occupation in this district, both in the central parts and along the Euston Road in the neighbourhood of the large railway termini.’

You can explore Booth's Soho for yourself on the London School of Economics Booth website, which has high quality downloadable copies of the Poverty Map, as well as digitised versions of the original Booth notebooks on Soho: 

https://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebooks/search?q=Soho&mode=any

Sarah Wise teaches a 6-week Iintroduction to Charles Booth course at The Bishopsgate Institute and the City Lit. She is the author of The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (Vintage)

Murray's Cabaret Club.

“Murray’s Cabaret Club…We star showgirls walked bare-breasted on to the stage, and the hostesses, all cleavage and chat, moved among the wealthy and aristocratic middle-aged [clientele]…It was only after I left Murray’s and returned to the real world that I realised the strange underground fantasy life I had been leading” – Christine Keeler.

Dancing girls entertain customers while they eat at Murray's Cabaret Club. Getty Images

In 1913 one of London’s first nightclubs opened on Beak Street. 

Its American proprietor Jack May was alive to the tango craze then sweeping through the West End, and his exclusive venue was to host its wealthy enthusiasts. But scandal haunted the dance-floor and May was deported back home after allegations of opium trading and police bribery. In his place arrived nightclub aficionado Percival Murray (the surname was coincidental!) who revamped the Club in 1933.

Soho was then a hot-spot for the shabby and sleazy: for gambling dens, clip joints – anywhere that fuelled the demand for out-of-hours drinking. Not Murray’s Cabaret Club. Mr Murray was soon employing a 130-strong staff, amongst whom were classical choreographers, celebrated composers, lettered lyricists, and skilled seamstresses. And, of course, the dancers, showgirls and hostesses. 

Together, they pioneered the art of the cabaret floor-show. Two shows a night comprised three glamorous numbers based on different themes, each illustrated by elaborate – albeit scanty – costumes. Their standard was superlative. Their precision was balletic. And their format was unique; no other West End venue offered such inventive floor-shows that dissolved the traditional stage/audience separation.     

Percival Murray

The racy and respectable flocked nightly to Murray’s intimate basement venue. Royalty, film stars and leading politicians rubbed shoulders with notorious gangsters. Princess Margaret, King Hussein of Jordan, Jean Harlow: membership was eclectic, if exclusive. Even Winston Churchill attended, though his visits were apparently more discrete; allegedly, a screen would be erected to shield the Minister’s identity. Murray’s was where Gertrude Lawrence debuted as a chorus girl, where Kay Kendall worked before shooting to Hollywood fame, and where Ruth Ellis modelled before her hanging for murder. Society osteopath Stephen Ward was one of its best customers, and there would meet Murray’s showgirls Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler. 

Ward took Keeler – a teenage runaway – under his wing, whisked her off to aristocratic parties at Cliveden, and introduced her to government Minister John Profumo. Her love triangle with both Profumo and a Soviet spy would soon spark a national scandal. It hailed the downfall of Harold Macmillan’s government, and the birth of the Swinging Sixties.

The Club could only struggle on though the opening of the Playboy Club in 1966 sounded the death knell; Murray’s recipe of mild titillation and sophisticated entertainment looked dated in comparison. Although the amazing costumes and floor-shows cost a fortune, Percival Murray refused to update the venue and offset the enormous overheads by opening a gambling floor. 
Murray’s was forced to close in 1975. Though once the wealthy owner of a Rolls Royce collection, Central London flats, and hotel suites in Cannes, Mr Murray was now bankrupt and relegated to living in his chauffeur’s garage on what had been his country estate in Churt, Surrey. The chauffeur’s wife, Murray’s wardrobe mistress Elsie Burchmore, ended up with the Club’s costumes and designs.

Original costume design illustrations by Ronald Cobb.

“There’s nothing much left of [Murray’s] except the legend and the memories” wrote Christine Keeler years later. Little did she know that 380 costume designs by Ronald Cobb, Michael Bronze and Hilda Wetton were soon to come to light. For it was on a chance visit to an auction in Surrey that vintage poster dealer Charlie Jeffreys acquired the costume designs from the Burchmore family. 

Staff entrance signage.

They date from the late Thirties to the mid Sixties and have been the nucleus of ‘G-Strings and Gin Slings: The Story of Murray’s Cabaret Club’, an exhibition that ran for a month at the Century Club, this year. Mounted by The Museum of Soho in collaboration with Jeffreys. It has also featured costumes and other ephemera, including the original Club signage, menus and pamphlets.

In the Fifties, these designs injected a rare sparkle into a West End blighted by austerity. Now, hidden away carefully for decades, this has been their first public display. An amusing assortment of naughty policewomen, French maid fantasies, demonic dancers and space-age headdresses…their sparkle has never dimmed…

Ben Levy - curator and historian previously with the V&A in their Theatre and Performance department.

With thanks to King of Soho Gin, Shaftesbury Plc and Yak El Droubie of Korero Press

Spiritus Soho

Robert Rubbish, photo by mary cigarettes

Robert Rubbish is an artist and filmmaker based in London He was a founding member of the Le Gun art collective.. Robert Rubbish presents a new body of artwork inspired by Soho.

Cathi Unsworth Photo Etienne Gilfillan.

Cathi Unsworth is the author of five pop-cultural crime fictions, The Not Knowing, The Singer, Bad Penny Blues, Weirdo and WIthout The Moon, all published by Serpent's Tail and many of which draw upon the history of Soho. She lives in London and is a member and regular host of events for The Sohemian Society, celebrating the characters that have populated both the geographical Soho and the Soho of the Mind. For more, please go to www.cathiunsworth.co.uk

Prelude is a new body of work that explores places and people in Soho’s rich history. Robert likes to think of his work as "drifting though Soho’s time and space fabric". It is the third exhibition in his ongoing project Spiritus Soho.

Spiritus Soho

Robert Rubbish takes Cathi Unsworth on A Drift through Soho…

CU Where do your Soho memories start – and what first drew you to the place?

RR My interest in Soho started when I was nine or ten and being into Mod music. Soho was name-checked in Lola by The Kinks, Pinball Wizard by The Who and A Bomb in Wardour Street by The Jam, so I think that’s how I first became aware of it as a place. My first visit was on a school trip in 1988, where we given an afternoon to do what we wanted to and me and a mate went for a wander into Soho… What I remember most is going into a shop on Carnaby Street and buying some smiley acid house badges – and booming out of the shop stereo was I Got A Big Dick by Maurice Joshua, which me and my friend found very funny as teenagers. So that was my first introduction to Soho!

The Drift starts at 33 Wardour Street, original home of the Flamingo Club (Black Bombers)…

CU The associations for me are all checked in your picture – snappy dressers, black bombers, underworld figures and GIs mixing with the Modernists. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, Johnny Edgecombe and Lucky Gordon, Jack the Hat dancing to Prince Buster in The Long Firm… Did you ever dip a pointed toe in there yourself?

RR I am too young to have visited The Flamingo, though I have been interested in it since I got more into all things Mod when I was 18 and bought the book Mods! by Richard Barnes. It had photos of Mods in The Flamingo and newspaper cuttings about purple hearts and drugs… The thing that has influenced me most in recent time is a photo of Andy Summers and Zoot Money taken by Jeremy Fletcher at The Flamingo. I love the vibe of this photo the fashion of the men and the look of the outside of the club.

…then to Meard Street and 69 Dean Street (Traces of the Night People)…

CU This is Gossips/Billy’s/The Batcave/The Gargoyle/Alice in Wonderland/The Comedy Store/Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues and the home of night club culture – a corner of Soho that has started many trends! You seem to have represented them all in this picture. Is it also Lord Longford with his camera in the corner? Is this referencing his 1971 enquiry into pornography that basically brought down the Dirty Squad who really ran all the Soho rackets, as told in Paul Willetts’ Paul Raymond biography Members Only/The Look of Love?

RR It’s amazing that so much stuff happened in that building! In my artwork I have featured King Charles II’s mistress, Nell Gwynne, who once lived in this building. Then all the history with David Tennant, who ran The Gargoyle Club. All the club people are represented from the Bowie night at Billy’s, The Batcave goths and Gaz Mayall from Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues. The man in the corner is actually based on a photo of the Soho photographer Harry Diamond – I liked the idea he is someone who took photos of Soho and jazz musicians. He is another ghost of the Soho night…

…then to Bar Bruno (Boys in the Cafés)…

CU A proper greasy spooner left in Soho! This picture makes me think of many classic London books where Soho cafés play a central role – James Curtis’ The Gilt Kid, Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho, Laura Del Rivo’s The Furnished Room, Roland Camberton’s Scamp, Terry Taylor’s Baron’s Court All Change and of course Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners… Again you seem to have captured the characters of these books passing through…

RR Bar Bruno to me is one of the last links with the old cafés that Soho once had and have all sadly gone now. All of the books you have mentioned have influenced this artwork, and also Bernard Kops’ The World Is A Wedding and Frank Norman’s Stand On Me – I love how a lot of the action takes place in Soho cafés. The title of the artwork comes form The Pogues’ song The Old Main Drag, where Shane MacGowan tells the story of how a young boy ended up on his uppers on the old main drag (Old Compton Street). This song is like a novel in a song and the lyrics: ‘Where the boys in the cafés would give you cheap pills’ always made me think of one of these old cafés. So I went in to Bar Bruno and took some photos as reference.
…then to the Bateman Buildings (Skiny White Sailor)…

CU Well, we all want a homage to the sailors and working girls of the district that populate all the above books and, of course, the works of Patrick Hamilton, Julian MacLaren-Ross and Daniel Farson’s essential Soho in the Fifties… I believe this was once the site of The Duke of Monmouth’s stately home and was described in 1895 by William Le Queux as: “a short, paved court, lined on each side by grimy, squalid-looking houses, the court itself forming the playground of a hundred or so spirited juveniles of the unwashed class.”

RR I didn’t know it was the site of Duke of Monmouth’s stately home but I like this –another layer! I have used sailors a lot in my work for Spiritus Soho as the sailor represents the pleasure-seeker of the past looking for a good time. The working girls of Soho’s past I have read about in books like Barbara Tate’s West End Girls and Streetwalker: An Autobiographical Account of Prostitution 1960. There’s a great photo of working girls lined up on a Soho street in the daytime, prior to the Street Offences Act of 1959.

…then to Bateman Street (Lorelei mural)…

CU The Lorelei, like Bar Bruno, was an authentic family-run Italian Old Soho café that The Kid in Absolute Beginners would likely have frequented. The mural of the mermaid took up an entire wall – although strangely the legend of Lorelei is a German one. This perhaps sums up the fusion of cultures that has always been a Soho hallmark?

RR If there’s one place that I miss in Soho its the Lorelei – I had so many great times in there. The Lorelei was a time capsule, a place that connected Soho past and present. The mural was amazing and even though it was based on the German legend, it seemed to me to be about Soho the siren, beckoning the sailor to the rocks. Yes, the history of Soho is all about different cultures mixing and bringing their food culture and styles, and no more so than in the coffee shop boom of the 1950s.

…then to Archer Street, site Charlie Chester’s Casino (Caught in a Game of Chance)…

CU Named after (though not run or owned by) the popular 1940s-50s comedian, Charlie Chester’s casino was at 12 Archer Street and once had a laudably Pop Art exterior… The trainee dealers were called ‘Lumpies’ and debuted their skills at the 10p per stake ‘Lumpy Pit’. The place was described by a former of their number, Chris Moore as: “an incubation chamber for the London gaming industry,” that was: “aimed squarely at the bottom of the market”. Like The Flamingo, a melting pot of Soho sinners and no doubt a handy stop-off point for the Dirty Squad…

RR I like the fact that building still has the casino sign on it if you look up! This to me is another ghost of Soho’s past. This artwork was the meeting of three different influences. I read Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt and it was so good it really gave me the feel for Soho at that time, Bacon’s attitude to life and his gambler’s instinct that lead me to re-watch John Maybury’s Love is the Devil and I loved the film even more from reading Michael Peppiatt’s book – and they both use Charlie Chester’s. I like how John used the real outside of the building in his film, with all the neon and dice. At the same time, I have been in love with the song Madame George by Van Morrison – its other-worldly vibe made me riff a reworking of it as poem for this artwork:

Guided and wired by the pink moon
You slip into a trance intoxicated by a game of chance
And the sweet smell of men’s perfume fills the room
In a subterranean bar you take another drink
Just to see how far you may fall
And you fall
In love again

…then 8 Marshall Street, site of William Blake’s birthplace (Visions of William Blake)…

CU You have captured perfectly here the way I feel when I look up at that tower block and wonder what William ‘Nature Boy’ Blake would have made of it all…

RR I would like to think William Blake would like this Brutalist tower block. I like to think of it as an Obelisk to Blake’s memory. As I was wandering down Broadwick Street last year, there was a building hoarding in front of what was to be the site of The Ivy and on it was printed a reproduction of William Blake’s The Grave Personified artwork of a figure holding poppies. At the time, I was thinking of making a artwork about Blake and the tower block, so I took this as a gift from the Soho streets. A lot of my ideas come from walking around Soho.

…then 43 Carnaby Street (Lord John 1967)…

CU This wonderful homage to Swinging London and Warren and David Gold’s boutique brings to mind one of my favourite films, Smashing Time – written by top Soho swinger George Melly – in which Northern lasses Yvonne (Lynn Redgrave) and Brenda (Rita Tushingham) arrive in the capital in 1967 in search of paradise. Winding up in Camden Town instead, Yvonne instructs Brenda: “Give us ten bob and wait here while I got to Carnaby Street, get a job as a model and find us a flat. Then I’ll come back and get you.” Yvonne and Brenda were turned into Princess Margaret and The Queen by Private Eye and there is a song on the soundtrack about Carnaby Street that is playing in my head as I look at this…

RR George Melly is one of my all-time big influences and yes, Smashing Time is a great take on the Swinging Sixties. I’ve always loved photos of the Lord John shop in Soho and it has always interested me as a visual landmark of the point when the 1960s went psychedelic – the music changed, the style changed and the mindset changed. LSD was a big factor in this change and that’s what I wanted to get across in this artwork, that the mural on the building has come alive and is projecting beyond. One bit of music that I had in my mind when making this artwork was Nicky Hopkins’ 1967 instrumental version of the Rolling Stones’ She’s A Rainbow.

…ending at Walker’s Court (Red Light artwork and Sailor Minotaur and Twilight Daughters) relate to the death of Soho’s past walk ups.

CU The end of Walker’s Court is what sort of brought us together, isn’t it Robert? I had more responses to my FB outpouring of grief on this subject than anything else I have ever put on there… My own first entrée to Soho was listening to Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, with its cover of Marc Almond and Dave Ball in a neon-lit doorway underneath The Bridge of Thighs that demarks the former territory of Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar and all those little shops and secret places… Remembered for posterity in Gallon Drunk’s Jake on the Make. Is this really the end of Soho?

RR Walker’s Court was an unique piece of London architecture and walking though it gave me a feeling, a vibe. I think it’s so short-slighted to knock down the old buildings and replace them with glass boxes. They call it progress, but why can’t we have a mix of both old and new? Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret has been a big influence on my work for Spiritus Soho, it evokes the seedy underbelly of the old place. Your post about Walker’s Court was interesting and people really care and are affected by what’s going on in Soho – once you knock it down it’s gone forever.

And thank you for bringing Gallon Drunk’s song Jake on the Make to my attention. Jake Vegas is part of the Soho I know and love and its good to see him leaning on a lamppost playing his stereo in plastic bag, sipping one can of lager and having a chat with him.

Soho will never die. It will keep changing, but maybe it’s the death of the Soho I feel in love with and still love. People are being priced out and that’s sad – and to think it will just become about who can afford to be there is very short-sighted and kills the community that Soho has always had.

"Prelude" the exhibition continues at We Are Cuts, 33a Dean Street. 11 May – 30 June 2017.