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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
