David

For nearly three decades, Madame Jojo’s stood as the beating heart of Soho nightlife. It was a place where drag queens in six-inch heels shared the stage with indie rockers, where Stanley Kubrick filmed scenes for his final masterpiece, and where a generation of Londoners danced until dawn. Then, in November 2014, the doors closed … Read more

If you walk through Soho today, you will see craft cocktail bars, boutique coffee shops, and media offices. But for over a century, this same patch of central London was the most infamous red light district in Britain. The story of how that happened is not simple or accidental. It is a tale of immigration, … Read more

Walk through Soho today and you will find neon-lit streets packed with restaurants, pubs, music venues, and film production companies. It is hard to imagine that fewer than eighty years ago, those same streets were choked with smoke, rubble, and the screams of air raid sirens. The Soho Blitz experience is a story that most … Read more

Walk south from Oxford Circus on a Friday evening and you will feel the city change before you see a single sign. The foot traffic thickens. The restaurant patios get louder. Somewhere between Regent Street and Wardour Street, the air itself seems to carry a different kind of energy. That shift is what people mean … Read more

Long before Soho became synonymous with nightlife and neon, it was one of London’s most remarkable melting pots. Two immigrant communities in particular left a permanent stamp on this square mile: the French and the Italians. The story behind Soho’s French and Italian immigrant communities stretches from the late 1600s all the way to the … Read more

Walk down Wardour Street today and you will see bars, restaurants, and office buildings. But look closer at the facades and brass plaques, and you will find traces of the most culturally significant street in British entertainment history. For nearly a century, this single Soho thoroughfare housed the headquarters of the British film industry and … Read more

In the late summer of 1854, a deadly cholera outbreak swept through London’s Soho district, killing more than 600 people in a single neighborhood within ten days. Dr. John Snow, a local physician who had spent years arguing that cholera was waterborne, walked the streets of Soho recording every death on a hand-drawn map. The … Read more

If you walked through Soho on a Friday night in 1975, the first thing that hit you was the smell. Cigarette smoke poured from every doorway, mixing with stale beer, cheap perfume, and the greasy fog from late-night chip shops. Neon signs buzzed in pink and red, advertising girls, girls, girls. Men in dirty raincoats … Read more

Walk through Soho Square on any given afternoon and you will see office workers eating lunch on benches, tourists photographing the quaint half-timbered hut at its centre, and locals cutting through on their way to Oxford Street. What almost nobody realises is that they are standing on top of centuries of buried history. Soho Square … Read more

Picture London in 1921. The Great War has just ended, jazz is pouring out of basement clubs on Frith Street, and a woman named Kate Meyrick is building a nightclub empire that will land her in prison multiple times. Not far away, Brilliant Chang is running an empire of a different kind from a quiet … Read more