Soho - "Television, Pride & Prejudice"

Location

• Soho is located in the centre of London’s west end and is an entertainment district which for much of the later part of the 20th century had a reputation for its sex shops as well as its night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s this area has undergone considerable transformation and is now a fashionable district of up-market restaurants, advertising agencies and media offices with only a small remnant of sex industry venues in the west of the area.

Historical facts

• Until 1536, the area which is now Soho was grazing farmland when it was taken by Henry VIII as a hunting park for the Palace of Whitehall. The name ‘Soho’ is thought to have first been used during the 17th century as a hunting call.
• In the 1660s the Crown granted Soho Fields to Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans. He leased 19 of its 22 acres to Joseph Girle who bought a licence to develop the area and in 1677 sold his lease to bricklayer Richard Frith for development. In 1698 William III granted the Crown freehold of most of the area to William, Earl of Portland. Meanwhile the southern part of what became the parish of St Anne Soho was sold by the Crown in the 16th, with part going to Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester – landowner’s names continue today as in the local street & square names; Frith, Jermyn, Portman streets and Leicester Square.
• Despite the best intentions of landowners such as the Earls of Leicester and Portland to develop the land on the grand scale of neighbouring Bloomsbury, Marylebone and Mayfair, Soho never became a fashionable area for the rich. Its low rents attracted immigrants who began to settle in the area. The French church in Soho Square attracted French Huguenots in the 17th and 18th centuries and by the mid 1700s Soho’s aristocratic residents living in Soho Square & Gerrard Street had moved further west.
• By the mid 1800s most respectable families had moved out and prostitutes, music halls and small theatres began to move in. During the early 1900s foreign nationals opened cheap eating houses which also attracted poor intellectuals, writers and artists. From the 1930s to the early 1960s the pubs were packed with drunken writers, poets and artists, many of whom never stayed sober long enough to become successful. A mural depicting a variety of Soho characters including writer Dylan Thomas and jazz musician George Melly is in Broadwick Street, at the junction with Carnaby Street.
• The music scene in Soho can be traced back to 1948 and Club Eleven, located at 41 Great Windmill Street, was probably responsible for modern jazz taking off in the UK. Soho was the setting for Brecht’s famous song ‘Mack the Knife’.
• In the early 1950s, Soho became the centre of the Beatnik culture in London. The Le Macabre coffee bar in Wardour Street, with its coffin shaped tables, portrayed beat poetry, jive dance and political debate. The 2 i’s Coffee Bar, where Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Manfred Mann and others were discovered, performed live acts in its tiny basement and was probably the first rock club in Europe when it opened in 1956. Soon Soho was the centre of the fledgling rock scene in London. Wardour Street was the home of the legendary Marquee Club which opened in 1958 and where the Rolling Stones first performed in July 1962. Eric Clapton and Brian Jones both lived for a time in Soho sharing a flat with rock publicist, Tony Brainsby. Later the Sex Pistols lived above number 6 Denmark Street, and recorded their first demos there.
• Soho also had its industrial side – the Cross & Blackwell pickle factory started off in Soho Square, and the American ‘Marlboro’ cigarette was named after the Philip Morris cigarette factory in Great Marlborough Street, at the rear of the London Palladium.

Famous Residents

• Casanova
• John Snow
• Karl Marx
• Lord Nelson
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Samuel Johnson
• William Blake
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart