Chapter 16 Taking a Light Glass in Soho

Abstract

I am taking a light glass in Soho! Standing outside the Coach and Horses (one of my regular haunts), with my newly acquired drinking companion, who is reminiscing about how things have changed. She misses her days with Soho luminaries, not least ‘No Knickers Joyce’. She drains the glass of wine that I bought her and goes back inside. She will never speak to me again. Such is the character of Soho – sustained by drink and legends. Today it’s a cosmopolitan quarter of restaurants, pubs, bars, coffee shops and clubs, interspersed with traders, hairdressers, porn shops and media houses. It’s here that London’s gay ‘village’ affably co-exists with tourists, hedonists, media- types and epicures. Soho is comprised of about 130 acres of central London. Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road mark its physical boundaries, and provide a framework for its powerful and enduring symbolic culture. Soho was extolled by a foreign diplomat at the beginning of the 20 th Century as a home of artists, dancers and musicians and a sanctuary for foreign refugees. Fifty years later it was condemned by the Daily Mail as a neighbourhood, ‘Solely for stinking men, prostitutes, perverts and pimps.’ Whatever its perceived failings, its rich diversity placed it at the vanguard of new tastes – particularly in food and fashion. It has remained a case study in cross-cultural acceptance, as well as a theatre of over-indulgence and unruly living.