The Colony Room Club was a private members’ drinking club at 41 Dean Street, Soho, London, founded by Muriel Belcher in 1948. For 60 years, it served as a sanctuary for bohemians, artists, and creatives, becoming one of Soho’s most notorious and culturally significant drinking dens before closing in 2008. Picture a single room on … Read more
Walk down Denmark Street today, tucked between Charing Cross Road and St Giles High Street in the shadow of the Crossrail development, and you might miss the ghosts. But they are everywhere. The Rolling Stones recorded their debut album at number 4. David Bowie rehearsed in a tiny room above a guitar shop. The Sex … Read more
Battle of Soho is a 2017 independent documentary film directed by Aro Korol that chronicles the gentrification of London’s iconic Soho district. The film documents the closure of legendary venues like Madame Jojo’s, the displacement of the LGBT and drag communities, and the resistance movement fighting to preserve one of the world’s most culturally significant … Read more
It is 7:45 on a Tuesday evening and Frith Street smells like garlic butter, charcoal-grilled lamb, and fresh croissants all at once. A couple is arguing (happily) outside Barrafina about whether to queue or try their luck at Bao. A kitchen porter on a smoke break nods at the delivery rider next to him. Somewhere … Read more
If you walked through Soho on a Friday night in 1965, you would have heard something remarkable. Bass lines bled through club doors on Wardour Street. Guitar amps crackled from basement rooms on Oxford Street. American-imported blues records spun in coffee bars on Old Compton Street. The entire neighborhood, barely a square mile, hummed with … Read more
Every city has a soul. It lives in the corner deli where the owner knows your order by heart. It echoes through the music pouring out of a basement club at 2 AM. It sits in the decades-old laundromat, the family-owned bookstore, the murals painted by local kids on brick walls. But what happens to … Read more
Walk through Soho today and you will find sleek bistros, upscale izakayas, and designer coffee shops lining every block. But the Soho food scene did not start this way. It began as a ragged cluster of artist-run kitchens inside abandoned industrial lofts, fueled by creativity rather than capital. Understanding how Soho’s dining landscape transformed over … Read more
Walk through Soho on any given morning and you will hear a dozen languages before you reach the end of Old Compton Street. The espresso machines are humming. Someone is arguing about football in Italian. A barista is dialing in a single origin Ethiopian that arrived yesterday. This is the Soho that refuses to disappear, … Read more
Walk down Old Compton Street in Soho today and you will find fish and chips shops, cocktail bars, and crowds of tourists. But if you stop at number 59 and look up, you will see a green plaque marking one of the most important addresses in music history. This was the 2i’s Coffee Bar, the … Read more
Some restaurants serve dinner. Kettner’s served history. When you walk past the Georgian townhouse on Romilly Street in Soho today, you are standing in front of one of London’s oldest surviving dining rooms, a place where kings dined, playwrights plotted, and a secret tunnel reportedly connected the kitchen to a theatre stage door. The story … Read more