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Photographers’ Gallery, LondonThe slow demise of a bohemian melting pot is chronicled in a movingly melancholic show that shuns the obvious
In 1957, VUE magazine described Soho as “the world’s wickedest square mile”. Back then, like its Parisian equivalent Pigalle, London’s Soho was a neighbourhood that traded on its bad reputation, luring the curious and the bohemian with its after-hours strip clubs, shebeens, peep shows and sex workers. That the gullible or the inebriated could fall prey to pickpockets, hucksters and conmen only added to the area’s illicit glamour.
Soho’s seediness survived, albeit in diluted form, into the 1980s and beyond, with such wayward songwriters as Shane MacGowan summoning its dark heart in song. In The Old Main Drag, he evokes the rent boys who once haunted the back alleys, charging a fiver “for a swift one off the wrist”. All gone, all gone. In today’s Soho, a fiver might just get you a detox smoothie or a couple of flat whites served by an underpaid, overworked millennial. Seediness has been supplanted by rampant development and Darwinian gentrification, with Crossrail currently cutting a swathe though the heart of the square mile, decimating entire blocks. Continue reading...