{"id":3864,"date":"2017-10-08T01:12:50","date_gmt":"2017-10-08T00:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennywilson.org\/2017\/10\/08\/soho-stories-celebrating-six-decades-of-sex-drugs-and-rocknroll\/"},"modified":"2017-10-08T01:12:50","modified_gmt":"2017-10-08T00:12:50","slug":"soho-stories-celebrating-six-decades-of-sex-drugs-and-rocknroll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/2017\/10\/08\/soho-stories-celebrating-six-decades-of-sex-drugs-and-rocknroll\/","title":{"rendered":"Soho stories: celebrating six decades of sex, drugs and rock\u2019n\u2019roll"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Soho\u2019s fashionable Carnaby Street in the 1970s. Photograph: Robert Estall Photo Agency\/Alamy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>
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Introduction by Colin Vaines<\/em><\/strong>:<\/div>\n
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M<\/span><\/span>y sister was working for Paramount Pictures when I first visited Soho as a wide-eyed teenager. The place had been a home for the film industry since at least 1908, when colour film pioneer\u00a0Charles Urban<\/a>\u00a0moved into offices on Wardour Street. In the 1970s, all the big film companies had offices here.<\/p>\n

Dirty, smelly, noisy Soho was an unbelievably exciting mixture of pubs, restaurants, cafes and markets. And the people! Spotty, chain-smoking youths wheeling handcarts piled high with film cans narrowly avoided being hit by taxis as the most multinational and multicultural mix of people I\u2019d ever seen surged around the streets.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s face it, for a teenage boy, Soho had one other key attraction: it was very, very naughty. Red lights were everywhere and every other entrance seemed to be a strip club, massage parlour, sex cinema or sex shop selling magazines and 8mm home movies. Displays inside and outside the shops, sometimes plastered on entire walls of buildings, were as graphic as the law \u2013 or rather, the notoriously corrupt \u201cporn squad\u201d of the time \u2013 would allow.<\/p>\n

When I started as a reporter on the film industry trade paper\u00a0Screen International,<\/em>the area was still dominated by the sex trade. By the mid-1980s, things were beginning to change. Westminster council, under pressure from some high-end residents, began clamping down on the sex trade, refusing to renew licences for sex shops and closing the many illegal video shops that had sprung up to capitalise on the new VHS boom.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Brewer Street, 1988. Photograph: Rex<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>
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Within five years, the gay community had started taking over empty shops and bars, and from the flat where, as an independent film producer, I now lived and worked, I saw the transformation of Old Compton Street in the 1990s into a vibrant hub of cafes and shops fuelled by the \u201cpink pound\u201d.<\/p>\n

Old, louche Soho carried on in the shape of pubs such as the Coach and Horses and the York Minster (now called the French House), clubs such as Gerry\u2019s and the Colony Room and illegal drinking dens. New, louche Soho showed its bleary face in the wave of contemporary clubs such as the Groucho, Blacks, the Union and Soho House. An evening out for me usually lasted from 7.30pm to 7.30am and involved walking less than a hundred yards, as there were just so many places to drop into, with so many extraordinary people to meet.<\/p>\n

Soho has always been a village and historically it\u2019s been a village full of low-lifers and high-lifers, romantics and realists, drunks and dreamers, sex workers and bar workers \u2013 every walk of life is represented. But one thing binds us together \u2013 a ferocious loyalty to the place.<\/p>\n

Even though the alleyway on which I live could accurately be described as \u201cdodgy\u201d, it still feels the safest place I\u2019ve ever called home. People have always looked out for each other in Soho, and if a girlfriend was ever bothered by a random guy as she was unlocking the door to my house, you could bet that a local dealer, working girl or strip-club caller would be at her side like a shot, checking that she was OK.<\/p>\n

When I moved into the flat, the restaurant owner below my old place organised trollies with the local market workers to shift my stuff down the road. When I was locked out once, one of the local pimps rounded up some of his clients to join me in yelling for someone to come down and let me in.<\/p>\n

Of course, there\u2019s always been a dark side and even my somewhat rose-tinted spectacles allow me to acknowledge that. But to date, despite the best efforts of the police and gentrifiers, no one has been able to prove that a Mr Big is moving behind the scenes of the sex business, in the way that the so-called Maltese mafia ran the vice trade in the 1950s and 60s. The women I know are hard-working, self-employed girls and their treatment was deplorable during the questionable police raids at the end of 2013 (which happened to coincide with a Westminster council meeting to vote on the demolition of some historic buildings and construction of a steel-and-glass eyesore that even the council\u2019s planning department thinks is oversize and poorly designed).<\/p>\n

That raid really marked the latest phase of gentrification in Soho, where it seems like every other building is being gutted or demolished to make way for expensive flats, most likely to be bought by overseas investors. Much of this gentrification is fuelled by developments such as\u00a0Crossrail<\/a>\u00a01 and 2 (the latter of which threatens to destroy the Curzon Soho and inflict years of massive construction work in the heart of the theatre district). Much of the gentrification is due to plain greed overriding any kind of social commitment or social policy.<\/p>\n