Francisco Garcia searches for answers in the dwindling epicentre of London.
Soho is poised at a critical juncture. The issue lies in the rancorous disagreements between its various constituents about the kind of future that should be pursued in this square mile of prime real estate. In October, the Mayor of London’s Office overruled the recommendations of local councillors and are now entertaining the idea of pedestrianising the whole neighbourhood, a suggestion that has outraged the dwindling number of people living there.
Soho’s more recent history is often told in terms of steady gentrification, with its sleazy edges smoothed off by the remorseless march of time and capital. Its dense warren of interlocking streets have long carried a reputation for cosmopolitanism, glamour and seediness. And, for centuries, the area has served as the epicentre of London’s sex trade, even in its dwindling contemporary form. As the millennium drew closer, Soho drifted toward respectability, with property prices and commercial rents beginning their steady climb upwards. The transgressive, countercultural neighbourhood of old began morphing into a mainstream tourist destination and hospitality mecca, for good and ill. The sex trade gradually receded – in visibility, at least – to be replaced, the cliché goes, by a neater, more homogenised reality, a process spearheaded by major developers and landowners, like Soho Estates, run by the ebullient John James, and Shaftesbury Capital, founded by the considerably more understated Levy family.
I’d become interested in this increasingly bitter debate around Soho’s future at the start of the year. Having long covered all manner of complicated squabbles across the capital, something in the story felt fresh. If the apparent three-way stand-off between ‘business’, local authority and residents was familiar, the prospect of reporting on it in this part of town was not. Like most Londoners, I have my own private Soho myth kitty, a 15-year-plus patchwork of nights on the tiles, after-work pints, weekend rambles and random, piecemeal weirdness to contend with. And, in trying to unpick the various claims and counterclaims regarding the enrichment or desecration of Soho, I realised that the concerns of the area’s small, centuries-old residential community had never really been factored into them.
Beverly Elie doesn’t have too much time for nostalgia. A lot has changed since the 59-year-old first moved to Soho in the summer of 1989. Elie, who was born with arthrogryposis, a rare disorder with severe impact on everyday movement, did not experience the easiest of upbringings. Her Dominican birth mother was physically abusive, when she was present at all. Elie spent several years boomeranging in and out of the care system, before securing a two-bed local authority flat with a friend in a quiet block of flats just off Dean Street. ‘It was sheer bliss. Like life was really starting up, you know.’
Elie has been in the same block ever since. For the past 28 years, in the same one-bedroom flat we are sitting in on an overcast Tuesday afternoon in late September. It’s where many of the major events of her adulthood have played out, good, bad and indifferent. It’s where her son was raised and where she continues to cultivate a small potted garden by the front door. Neighbours have come and gone, some longer mourned than others. Being the heart of central London, noise – from revellers, residents and car traffic – has always been a fact of life. But she tells me the last few years have seen things escalate to a previously unknown intensity. ‘Oh it’s worse. The glass smashing on the street in the early hours. The pissed people getting into fights… it feels like things are declining in front of our eyes.’
Soho’s residential population has long been drifting into apparently terminal decline. In 1881, it stood at 16,608. The most recent census has it down at around 2,600. It’s easy to assume that anyone who would complain about the area’s noise while choosing to live in the neighbourhood must be an entitled blow-in. This does not bear scrutiny. Of those who remain, a substantial number are, like Beverly Elie, long-term social housing tenants, rather than recalcitrant millionaires. Okay, runs the counterargument I heard from landlords and several business owners, but surely it came down to individual agency. Bluntly, if they didn’t like it, couldn’t they just leave? ‘They must be off their rocker’, was one of the politer rejoiners Elie offered. ‘Where do they think I’m likely to be sent, Inverness?’
Over this year, I spoke with a wide selection of Soho residents, past and present, a diverse constituency of council and private tenants and middle-class, occasionally very wealthy homeowners, young, old and middle-aged. One lifelong resident, who didn’t want to be named on account of tiresome potential blowback, told me that the talk of the neighbourhood being sustained as a ‘world-class destination’ was all well and good, but it didn’t quite speak to the reality of rising crime and the ‘maximised churn’ of the hospitality industry. ‘World-class what?’, they’d asked me rhetorically. ‘World class shit?’
Others were more circumspect. Lucy Haine bought her flat in 1998. The civil servant concurs on crime and noise pollution. She did not take a particularly kind view of John James or Soho Estates. ‘It’s not about [caring] for the area. It’s about [their] rent.’ At least with Shaftesbury – which has hundreds of holdings across the West End – some constructive dialogue has been possible. ‘I probably sound like a real moaner. But people are going to ask what we’ve lost [the identity] for. So Soho Estates can make another billion pounds profit? Meanwhile Soho becomes another faceless, soulless place.’
At the same time, a chorus of frustration has swelled from local hospitality businesses and commercial landlords, rankled by what they characterise as a tiny group of obstructive, highly politicised residents, backed up by an enfeebled Westminster Council who accommodate their demands at the expense of Soho’s economic health. ‘We have what they call a stakeholder interest,’ explained James, the avuncular 71-year-old managing director of Soho Estates (West End property portfolio: £1 billion) when we met in his top floor Manette Street office on a dank autumn morning. ‘I will clearly tell you that I have never been asked to meet the leader of Westminster Council… [so] when they say ‘we are consulting with business’, you wonder who and where.’ The question remains: who does Soho belong to?
Ask detractors, and they may point you toward the Soho Society. The group has its roots in the early 1970s, when a coalition of local residents banded together to safeguard the area against mass demolition. It was fundamental in both the extension of the Soho Conservation Area and creation of the Soho Housing Association, which endures to this day. Today, the Soho Society spearheads campaigns, promotes local history, broadcasts a weekly radio show and even organises a yearly fête. In short, they’re precisely the kind of usefully civic-minded busybody you’d want advocating for your own neighbourhood. But perhaps most importantly, it retains a formal consultative role with Westminster Council regarding any new licensing and planning applications in the area.
On this reading, it is this cluster of residents who have stifled the area’s development. Their alleged interventions are numerous: Pride events refused temporary licences; the basement jazz club blocked on the basis of potential noise; a battle to recognise the Dean Street Tesco Express as an ‘asset of community value’. If the supermarket lacks aesthetic merit or special interest to tourists, it is undeniably useful if you live locally and are running low on bog roll and milk.
Perhaps most damning of all, their opponents say, is their dogged opposition to outdoor dining and hospitality across the area. Back in the summer of 2020, there was tacit agreement between residents, business and commercial stakeholders that action needed to be taken to save Soho’s hospitality industry. Between July 2020 and the end of September 2021, restaurants set out outside tables and chairs in freshly pedestrianised roads across the neighbourhood. It was a resounding success, at least from a business perspective, with 100 table and chairs licences granted and 14 streets closed until 11pm, seven days a week. Residents, who had to deal with the associated noise and chaos, did not share in the spoils.
The scheme eventually ended despite similar arrangements persisting in other pockets of central London, including nearby Covent Garden. The Conservative-led Westminster Council began drafting a longer-term plan, entitled ‘Vision for Soho’, with permanent alfresco a key component. These plans were quietly paused, then effectively scrapped in 2022, as the council was captured by Labour for the first time in its history; a political upset driven, some contend, by Labour’s pandering to the residents’ anti-alfresco demands. Many of the residents I spoke with refute this characterisation. For some, the spurious charge was evidence that their sincere concerns had ceased to matter at all; that their continued existence was an irritant to both the council and the area’s commercial interests, who would much rather transform the area into a booze-soaked chain-pub bacchanalia.
There was one man I urgently needed to speak with. Tim Lord is the society’s current chair, a position he has held since the summer of 2018. The 59-year-old lawyer moved to Soho in the summer of 1991. Like many, Lord had fallen in love with the area’s inclusiveness and sense of possibility. ‘It was a great place to live. I’m a gay man. For a lot of us from a similar generation, you’ll hear the same thing: that it was the first place they felt accepted, and safe.’
Lord holds strident opinions and has been known to communicate them with a force some argue can tip into hectoring. The idea, he says, that the Society exercises a sinister hold over the council is laughable, even if he concedes that the conversation around alfresco had become pronouncedly toxic. The Soho Society did not claim to speak for everyone in the neighbourhood indeed there were plenty of residents who did not share their campaigning zeal, who were only dimly aware of their activities, if at all.
For some businesses and several commercial landlords, Lord has become something of a bogeyman: a supercharged NIMBY obstructionist, hellbent on opposing any new development that runs afoul of the Soho Society’s tastes. Which is, his critics allege, all of them. James told me that, since 2022, the Soho Society had reviewed 102 planning applications and taken issue with 101 of them (Lord offered a very different stat from 2023, which had them opposing 78 of 348 applications. Since July, they had reviewed 127, objecting to only 18). I met with Lord several times over the course of reporting, and our discussions were always productive and amiable. The caricature of a bristling and myopic parish councillor did not fit with the self-aware, humorous man in front of me. Though it was true, he told me during one of our early meetings, that there must be some in the Westminster Council licensing department who likely considered him a flagrant pain in the arse.
Lord’s stance can be summed up as follows: the idea that Soho’s nightlife is declining is not supported by factual evidence. Of its 491 licensed premises, 121 have late-night licences with closing hours ranging between 1am and 6am, with a cumulative capacity of almost 23,000. Between 2020 and 2023, an additional 51 new alcohol licences were granted, raising this capacity by several thousand. One of the Soho Society’s roles is to scrutinise applications for their potential impact on residents, as well as the area’s general character. Talk of the area’s general decline as a tourist destination is, he says, nonsense. ‘It is more mainstream. Less transgressive… it’s much more popular. There was always drinking and entertainment in the area, but it wasn’t the only thing that was happening.’
It’s a view echoed by Brian Clivaz, a minor legend of central London hospitality and long-time chairman of L’Escargot, the venerable French restaurant in the middle of Greek Street. ‘Oh it’s mobbed,’ he breezily explained. ‘Far more so than a decade ago’. This change could partially be explained in terms of transport, with a day, or night, out in Soho now even more accessible on account of the Elizabeth line, finally opened for use in May 2022.
Soho was – is – unique, agrees Lord. Nowhere else in London could offer the same blend of hospitality, retail and culture. And no one was proposing to transform the area into a suburban idyll, a Penge-on-Piccadilly. But there had to be balance. And until the alfresco debacle, things worked pretty well for the most part. But something had since tipped badly out of whack. Alfresco was just the first and best-publicised battleground. If James and others in the Soho Business Alliance wanted its return, it wasn’t due to any concern with preserving the neighbourhood’s vaguely transgressive charm or its appeal to tourists, from London or elsewhere. It was just about maximising returns in the crudest way possible. As for nightlife, it used to be pretty simple. Licensed venues – apart from a handful of nightclubs and late-night spots – would wind down around 11pm. This was no longer the case. ‘At one AGM, an old woman who has lived in Soho for ages stood up and asked what happened to the protected hours.’
Lord sent me the results of a survey in which the majority of the respondents reported seriously disrupted sleep at least three or four nights a week, caused at least partially by ‘people drinking and shouting in the street’. It isn’t just about noise, Lord repeatedly stressed. Figures published by Westminster Council earlier this year suggest that the borough now accounts for 9.2 per cent of all reported crime in London. This is particularly acute in Soho, he says. ‘The number of people coming [to Soho] now has attracted organised criminals who prey on these visitors.’ Thefts and sexual assaults are on the rise, with an overstretched police force rendered almost irrelevant. In May 2023, two off-duty police officers were stabbed on Greek Street, a particular crime hotspot. It was suggested to me by several people I spoke with that this might have contributed a reluctance to patrol the neighbourhood.
‘I have some sympathy with the police,’ said Clivaz. ‘They don’t have the resources and the West End is a very big area.’ Any increase in late-night licences would only exacerbate an already fairly dire problem, says Lord. The council’s own recent cumulative impact report seems to agree, concluding that reported incidents, particularly theft, ‘feature prominently in areas with a high concentration of licensed premises’ and that any proliferation of additional licences would only lead to a further increase in crime. One couldn’t really blame the businesses in question for wanting to open later and longer, in an attempt to cope with years of rent increases imposed by landlords, including Soho Estates. When I put this to James, his response was withering. It just wasn’t that simple. The market sets the rent, the landlord merely adheres to it. ‘It would be a retrogressive step to say this [should] become a low rent area… it’s an improved area. Look out the window. It’s the middle of the city.’
I’d first emailed James in hope rather than expectation, back in late September. His response arrived within minutes. Yes, he’d be happy to chat. In the meantime, I was to read his recently composed open letter on the future of Soho, which railed against the Soho Society and Westminster Council, whose stubbornness in planning and licensing matters was making them seem more like ‘a rural council… [than] the most important local authority in the entire country’.
James’s biography is undeniably captivating. The native Cumbrian moved to London in the 70s to pursue a modelling career. After a stint with Levi’s, among others, he became acquainted with the late Paul Raymond, legendary Soho porn-turned-property baron. Some years later, James married Paul’s daughter, Debbie, with whom he has two daughters.
From reasonably humble beginnings, Soho Estates now preside over a portfolio of West End property bars and restaurants, grand office spaces and residential accommodation. ‘This is a privately run business. A family business, started by one man, my father-in-law, in 1958, God bless him,’ he offered as we spoke in his office. ‘This family business will continue. It is generational. We are a professionally run inherited estate… and we have a respect for the historic nature [of the] area.’
James’s arguments are straightforward. History, nostalgia, call it what you want, is all well and good. But times are changing whether one likes it or not. ‘If you don’t accommodate that change then business will go somewhere else.’ With every high street in the country struggling, why would Soho be any different? And if the area retained its vibrancy, it was in spite of the restrictions and roadblocks put up by a tiny group of residents – and a council in their thrall. ‘Anyone else would like to take Soho’s magic and put it in Shoreditch, or Hoxton, or Brixton.’ Businesses struggled to get a fair hearing from the council, he suggested. As for the Soho Society, the less said the better.
There was, I thought, a fairly heavy irony in Paul Raymond’s son-in-law being one of the key figures in Soho’s sanitisation. It was also slightly comical to hear one of central London’s most powerful and influential commercial landlords complain about the prissiness of a local authority long criticised as being riddled with conflicts of interest and an exceptionally cosy relationship to property developers (in 2022, Jacobin labelled it the ‘sordid epicentre’ of local authority corruption in the UK). It is difficult to know exactly what Westminster Council thinks about this characterisation – or the opposite charge of being obstructive to business – as they did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
People like harking back to a golden age, James reflected. When I Camisa & Son, a beloved Italian deli on Old Compton Street with its roots in the late 1920s, whose building was owned by Shaftesbury, shuttered in August, it provoked a wave of local grief and hand-wringing. But James told me that Mr Camisa had sold out to Alvini, an Italian food and wine importer, years ago, while the property’s freehold passed to Shaftesbury Capital. ‘The world of business will move on and adjust to what the world of business requires,’ was his stark take on matters. After our meeting drew to a close, James pointed out the window, down to the rain-slicked streets we’d spent the hour pontificating over. I couldn’t help thinking how grey and small things looked from such an exalted vantage point.
During the end of my last conversation with Lord, he sounded unusually downbeat. The fight over the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, yet another staunchly contested local issue – had taken a negative turn. After another bitter, years-long struggle, Labour-run City Hall had overruled Labour-controlled Westminster Council to ramrod the plans through. Lord told me he just didn’t know if the continued existence of Soho’s residential community was possible, the way things were trending. ‘And if that’s [the aim] it would be better if it was communicated honestly.’
On a balmy Thursday evening in early September, I left my home in south-east London and caught the train to Charing Cross. I’d made plans to meet a friend for a drink and we’d finally agreed on the French House, a storied haunt on Dean Street. On arrival, the pub was packed with a good-natured, reasonably giddy late-week professional crowd. It was long after ten by the time I said my goodbyes and headed back out into the nighttime crush. Rickshaws in various shades of fluorescent pink cruised past, bearing naive or just catatonically pissed tourists. Post-theatre punters spilled out of the theatres, to mingle with the spirited dregs of the post-work crowd on the narrow streets. On Greek Street, I walked past a couple of comically open-air drug deals and a young couple having a screaming row about the size of their dinner bill. A pile of fresh sick lay proudly splattered outside the entrance to Tottenham Court Road tube.
I tried to recall if it felt busier, or more unsafe, than any other night I’d spent in the neighbourhood over the years, or if I was suffering from a bout of lager induced Baader-Meinhof. That I was simply seeing the chaos I wanted to see, to reinforce my sympathy with Lord and the put-upon residents. On leaving the densely packed streets, this sympathy was trumped by relief at returning to quieter, saner air.
