‘It has a well-deserved reputation for romance, possibly because you’re basically sitting on top of each other’
I’m old enough – just! – to remember when Soho wasn’t the semi-sanitised mediaville it is today. When its narrow streets and Georgian buildings promised the dubious thrills of cheap food, bad wine and worse behaviour. When the shambling chap in the stained suit turned out to be a world-famous artist and his pal, in designer glasses and bespoke shoes, a pimp.
I’m torn about Soho these days. On the one hand, I’m not buying the glamorisation of the old tart-with-a-heart up winding, red-lit steps. The remaining sleaze is just that: sleazy. Sit in Russell Norman’s Spuntino (not uncoincidentally one of the architects of nouveau Soho) and watch the drug deals and hollow-eyed “girls” across the road, and it won’t make you nostalgic for a bygone age of exploitative crime. But I do miss louche streets on which you might bump into gorgeous, top-hatted Sebastian Horsley (RIP, though that is, to be honest, unlikely). Days on which you might be ejected from a shebeen for “lowering the tone”. (Prostitution and criminality were OK, apparently, but don’t even think about drunkenly singing All My Exes Live In Texas.) Hey-ho: sometimes change has to be embraced, even if Madame Jo-Jo’s has shantéd away.
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