Authors: Barry Miles
Chelsea was once just such an area but in the 1920s many of the streets of
working-class houses were demolished to make way for blocks of flats for the rich. The rise of the motorcar allowed developers
to dismiss the grooms and coachmen and convert their mews cottages into bijou residences for artistic young people of the
sort described in Dorothy L. Sayers’ novels. In 1930 there was an insurrection by tenants armed with ‘thick sticks, clappers,
bells and whistles’ resisting eviction to make way for luxury flats. They were overcome by a small army of mounted and foot
police accompanied by massed bailiffs. Soon the wealthy newcomers were exclaiming over Chelsea’s delightful ‘village atmosphere’.
After the war Chelsea was shabby and run-down but the bomb damage was quickly repaired, and, with a few exceptions such as
Quentin Crisp, only the wealthier bohemians could afford to live there.
Soho, on the other hand, had always been the cosmopolitan centre of London, its character formed by successive waves of refugees.
Greek refugees from Ottoman rule settled there in 1670, giving Greek Street its name. They were followed by French protestant
Huguenots in the 1680s, and more French escaping the Revolutionary Terror of the 1790s. Belgians arrived fleeing the Germans
in 1914 and Germans and Italians have been settling in Soho ever since the 1850s. Many Polish and Russian Jews moved there
from the East End in the 1890s. But until World War Two, Soho took its character mainly from the French: they had their own
school on Lisle Street, a French hospital and dispensary on Shaftesbury Avenue, four churches, including the French Protestant
church on Soho Square, and a full supporting cast of restaurants, cafés, boucheries, boulangeries, pâtisseries, chocolateries
and the like. When I first came to London in the early sixties, you could buy vegetables and homemade cheese at La Roche on
Old Compton Street sent over three times a week by the owner’s French relatives; all the signs were in French and that was
the language of the store. The Vintage House down the street sold wine
en vrac
and the meat at La Bomba was butchered in French cuts. Until the Street Offences Act, most of the prostitutes on the streets
of Soho were also French. The French still have a presence in the area now, but most of the community has now settled around
the French lycée in South Kensington.
Superimposed on French Soho was Italian Soho, which by the 1940s was of equal importance to the French presence and introduced
the British to spaghetti and pizza, olive oil and Chianti. Italian restaurants sprang up all over Soho and are still plentiful.
With them came wonderful Italian food stores, some of which survive. Soho was also home to a large Cypriot community and also
housed numerous Hungarians and Spanish, and from the seventies onwards came the Chinese, who have now developed their own
Chinatown. Almost from the day it was first built Soho has been truly cosmopolitan and
remains so. At the end of the war, it was the only place in Britain that had a genuine continental flavour, as the bistros
and cafés tried to scrape together meals for a war-weary population. Strange to think that a candle in a Chianti bottle and
a fishing net across the ceiling was then considered unbelievably romantic and sophisticated.
Before the war the area north of Oxford Street was often included in the definition of Soho, when it was not referred to as
Fitzrovia, and like Soho it had a large continental population, including so many Germans that Charlotte Street was known
as Charlottenstrasse. I loved Schmidt’s on Charlotte Street which used the German system of the kitchen selling the food to
the waiters, who then sold it to the customers. Inevitably there was hot competition over where the guests sat and fights
were commonplace. One of my earliest memories of living in London is of one of the waiters at Schmidt’s shrieking: ‘Hans!
Again you haff stolen my spoons!’ and lunging across the huge room wielding a carving knife. Hans escaped through the swing
doors.
Regrettably, the re-zoning of Fitzrovia as light industrial to meet the demand for office space after the war let in the property
‘developers’, who lost no time in finishing off the destruction wrought by the Nazis: down came Howland Street and the artists’
studios of Fitzroy Street to be replaced by tacky office blocks, most of which have since been replaced. Down came John Constable’s
beautiful eighteenth-century house and studio in Charlotte Street to be replaced by a glass box containing PR companies and
advertising agencies, and next door looms the great bulk of Saatchi and Saatchi, replacing a whole block of eighteenth-century
houses. The Bloomsbury Group lived in these streets, as did Nina Hamnett and the painters of the Euston Road School. It is
entirely appropriate that in twenty-first-century Britain streets that were once filled with artists now contain Britain’s
highest concentration of advertising agencies; real artists displaced by the counterfeit, the second rate; creative individuals
prostituting their talent.
Not surprisingly then, it was to Soho that people came to get away from Britain for a few hours. It was in Soho that British
jazz and British rock ’n’ roll found their beginnings in dozens of late-night clubs; it was in the Soho pubs, like the French,
which even today does not possess a pint mug, where bohemia thrived and painters and boxers and students and prostitutes mingled;
it was where the bookshops were, and the cheap Greek and Italian cafés, and the drinking clubs, and spielers and brothels,
and where even a few art galleries tentatively opened their doors on to bomb-shattered streets.
When I first was first taken to the French pub in the early sixties, I felt
immediately at home. In the Cotswolds I had always felt a complete outsider in the pubs with their horse brasses and red-faced
gentlemen farmers in cavalry twills and chukka boots. At the French, in contrast, the faces of the clientele were deathly
pale, they wore shades and looked like artistic gangsters. They were drinking wine and pastis and there was not one mention
of agriculture. It was wonderful.
This book is set largely in the West End; it is there that the magnet which draws people into London is located. The bohemia
of Fitzrovia and Soho during the war years drew in the next generation: poets like Michael Horovitz graduated from Oxford
and moved straight to small flats in Soho. The beatniks of the early sixties congregated around Goodge Street in Fitzrovia,
giving the One Tun as their mailing address, thereby making it the destination of the next wave hitch-hiking in from Newcastle
and Glasgow. The underground scene of London in the sixties was perceived as a West End phenomenon: that was where the U F
O Club, Middle Earth, Indica Books, the
IT
offices, the Arts Lab and other centres of activity were located, but by then most of the contact addresses scribbled on
grubby bits of paper would have had w10 or w11 postcodes because that was where the cheap housing was.
Only in the nineties did the focus shift further east to e1 and e2, as artists colonized the grim industrial wastelands and
tower blocks of the East End proper. Writers such as Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Wright have staked
a claim to the East End as a dynamo of cultural ferment, crossed by ley-lines, studded with vertical time pits connecting
the present with the eighteenth century, inhabited by eccentrics and bohemians. Sinclair’s psychogeographical wanderings are
especially valuable in making this disparate part of London coherent. But there was pitifully little there in the eighteenth
century except market gardens and meadows. It was, and remains, suburban. They have made the best of a landscape of flooded
air-raid shelters, the floorplans of long-gone Nissen and American Quonset huts and post-war emergency prefabs; vistas enlivened
by the occasional remaining detail on a graffiti-covered Victorian town hall or an unusual allotment hut. They even have a
Hawksmoor church or two, but until recently this was not the London that pulls people halfway across the world.
The London of dreams is Swinging London: the King’s Road of rainbow-crested punks and Austin Powers; tourists on the zebra
crossing at Abbey Road; Big Ben and the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. It is more specifically the West End, which has
been the cosmopolitan centre of London for 300 years: the impeccably dressed old man slumped in the back of a shining chauffeur-driver
Rolls-Royce powering up Hill Street in Mayfair at 3 a.m.;
drunks trying to find their way out of Leicester Square; it is the late-night drinkers emerging from Gerry’s on Dean Street,
blinking in the sunlight as people push past them on their way to work. It is Chris Petit’s
Robinson
, Colin Wilson’s
Adrift in Soho,
Michael Moorcock’s
Mother London
and the Jerry Cornelius novels. Swinging London lives on in the imagination. But the scene has now shifted eastward. Recently,
walking down Great Chapel Street in Soho, I overheard two young men talking. ‘You know,’ one of them said, ‘looking at this,
you could easily be in Shoreditch.’ It is true; the vast acreage of the East End is now the artistic neighbourhood of London,
though it is too spread out to have any real centre: artists have studios everywhere from Hoxton to Stoke Newington to Bow.
They do engage with the older residents, but often their studios – where many of them live – are in semi-industrial areas
with few people living nearby. There are scores of small galleries, but as soon as they become successful they usually move
to the West End.
This book concentrates on the role of London as a magnet and its clubs and pubs as energy centres. With the advent of the
internet, Eurostar and cheap European air flights, the importance of London as a location has been reduced as people travel
to Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and all over for shows and art fairs, keep up to date with the latest events in New York, Sydney
and Moscow on the net, and use Skype to chat to friends working in Vancouver or Amsterdam. Globalization and cheap instant
communications mean that no matter how outrageous and cutting edge an event might be, people all over the world can know all
about it seconds later; a true underground is impossible now unless the participants are sworn to secrecy. For the same reason,
though many artists and musicians use London as their theme, many more could just as easily be working out of Paris or Berlin.
This is the twenty-first century, and things have changed.
Before World War Two, London was the greatest city on Earth; by V E Day, 8 May 1945, it was devastated: damaged buildings
standing in a sea of stones, bombsites overgrown with weeds, dunes of brick dust, rubble piled alongside hastily cleared streets.
Condemned structures stood windows open to the sky, strips of wallpaper hanging in flaps, stairs leading to nowhere. More
than a million houses had been destroyed in the blitz, leaving one in six Londoners homeless. Many buildings were occupied
by squatters who bravely set up house between walls shocked into strange angles by the bombs, sometimes propped up by wooden
buttresses. Cellars were flooded with stagnant, murky water bobbing with detritus and the corpses of rats, and equally dangerous
were the emergency static water tanks, large rectangular iron cisterns placed
near vulnerable buildings to counter the German incendiary bombs when the water mains were shattered: four foot deep and filled
to the top, enough to drown a child. Sheep grazed on Hampstead Heath, there was a piggery in Hyde Park and the flowers of
Kensington Gardens had been replaced with rows of cabbages. The city was beaten down, it was drab and monochrome, joyless.
There was stringent rationing of even basic food and fuel, poverty was apparent everywhere from the skinny kids playing on
the bombsites, the muttering tramps sleeping rough on the Embankment, many of them unhinged by the war, to the tired whores
in Soho and Park Lane. But despite the greyness and the smog, some of the pre-war spirit prevailed. The old bohemian areas
of Fitzrovia and Soho still had flickers of life in them.
There were communities overlapping in Soho: the local people who worked in the markets, restaurants and small workshops; the
sex workers and artists’ models, along with a few painters and writers and the bohemians and eccentrics who patronized the
bars and clubs from mid-morning until after midnight. Soho was desperately run down and parts had been badly bombed. Ninety
per cent of its population used the Marshall Street baths; Friday afternoon was the usual day for waiters. A first-class hot
bath was 6d and second class 2d, cold baths were half-price. People arrived with brown-paper parcels containing their clean
clothes, soap and towel. Most of them were the families of Italian waiters who lived in cramped rooms in Dean Street and Greek
Street, saving every penny to retire back to Italy and buy a farm. With Mediterranean staples like olive oil and wine virtually
impossible to get, these restaurateurs performed miracles daily to produce a semblance of Continental cuisine and provide
the ambience necessary to keep the spirit of Soho alive.
Soho was still very much a village despite wartime evacuation and the bombing. The same laissez-faire attitude that had always
attracted artists and writers, students and journalists, also attracted strippers and brothel keepers, gamblers and pornographers.
Throughout the war it was sustained by thousands of British and American troops who were there more for the brothels and gambling
dens than the food but who kept Soho alive, giving it a reputation as a red-light district that still remains in the popular
imagination. Hardly a street in Soho was without bomb damage; even St Anne’s was destroyed, leaving its tower standing alone
in a mountain range of rubble.
Despite the destruction, many people never left its streets; they would have felt like refugees anywhere else. There is a
story about an artists’ model, a regular at the Highlander on Dean Street, who appeared one Saturday morning formally dressed
complete with gloves and stockings. She even wore
a hat, a previously unseen occurrence. Asked if she was going to a wedding, she replied: ‘No. Going away for the weekend.
To Swiss Cottage.’
3
As Sammy Samuels, the owner of a series of spielers or gambling clubs, wrote about one of his clients: ‘he found his way into
Soho and so far as I know, has not been able to find the way out. And Soho does get some types of people that way. Maybe it’s
the air, or the feeling that you’ve gone “foreign” like in Africa or India, and it’s too good to change.’