David

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

Crossrail, now known as the Elizabeth line, permanently transformed Soho by punching a massive new transport interchange into its edges, demolishing beloved cultural landmarks like the Astoria Theatre, triggering the construction of major mixed-use developments such as Soho Place, and accelerating property values and commercial rents that altered the character of one of London’s most … Read more

Walk through Soho today and you will find neon-lit cocktail bars, independent coffee shops, and the kind of late-night energy that makes this patch of central London feel different from anywhere else in the city. But the streets beneath your feet carry stories that stretch back over four hundred years. The hidden meaning behind Soho’s … Read more

Walker’s Court is a narrow pedestrian alleyway in the heart of London’s Soho that dates back to the early 1700s. Originally a respectable shopping lane lined with small family-run businesses, it transformed in the late 1950s into the infamous epicentre of Soho’s sex trade, earning the nickname “Sex Alley,” before being redeveloped in the 2010s … Read more