21/09/26 - Soho

Searching for the previously undiscovered

Walk 3 in London's Hidden Walks finds me in probably my most visited part of town, Soho. How it changes - when I first came, 30 years ago, I can remember a pimp offering services, with me answering "no", until we both laughed. "Do I want a woman? Do I want a man? Well what do you want then?"

It's all sanitised now. The council refuses new alcohol licences unless there is table service to seated drinkers. After dark, I was surprised to see organised walking tours emerge, led by umbrella-wielding guides and followed by a posse of foreign thrill-seekers, presumably in search of London's darker side.

There's a job there for me, I am sure.

My guide-book runs to about 20 pages of descriptions, with every other building having a story to tell. I'll limit the blog to just the bits that are of interest and new to me. 

Into Soho

You'll be unsurprised that most are drinking related. Later in the night, I will be completing a Fitzrovian Pub Crawl - attempting to recreate the golden era of London drinking. Very much along that theme is the Colony Room - and it's more modern, still trading counterpart, the Groucho Club sitting side-by-side in Dean Street.

The Colony Room above Ducksoup

Groucho Club

The Colony Room was a legendary Soho drinking club at 41 Dean Street, founded in 1948 by Muriel Belcher. It became a bohemian refuge for artists, writers and assorted Soho misfits, with Francis Bacon among its most famous regulars, alongside Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Jeffrey Bernard. The atmosphere was famously louche, abrasive and alcohol-fuelled, with Belcher presiding over her clientele from behind the bar and cultivating an anything-goes attitude. Unlike the Groucho Club's later, more polished version of creative Soho, the Colony Room was resolutely grubby and disreputable. It finally closed in 2008, after six decades of serving as one of London's great drinking institutions; the original premises are now gone, but its reputation as the spiritual home of boozy, argumentative British art remains. 

Let's bring it to life.

On the booze theme, the guide starts the walk at Manette Street (renamed from Rose Street in honour of a Dickens character in A Tale of Two Cities) and the Pillars of Hercules. This was the watering hole for more recent writers, such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. From the front, it's been rebranded as a cocktail bar - not my cup of Long Island Iced Tea at all - but the rear provides a reminder of its former glory.

Lovely Day

Peter Cook's influential Establishment Club - a 1960s comedy club in Greek Street is celebrated with a blue plaque. This doesn't tell the story that the famous picture of Christine Keeler naked on a chair was photographed in the same building. Or that Casanova lived in the building opposite.

Red Neon advertising a bar of the same name

Moving away from booze and clubs onto writers; 

Bill Bryson was so enamoured with Hazlitt's Hotel in Frith Street that he included a chapter on it in his book "Notes from a Small Island". Georgian, containing many original features, it was bound to appeal to people who live in a country that is not quite as old.

Since 1718

I had never heard of the recipient of the next blue plaque - John William Polidori, physician to Lord Byron, whose home was in Great Pulteney Street.  During the same writing competition in Geneva that spawned Frankenstein, he wrote the Vampyre. Initially mocked by Byron and subsequently accused of plagiarism, he returned to this house to commit suicide by drinking acid. 

I wonder who lives there now

This only scratches the guide book's surface, but there is enough to entertain tourists. As long as my umbrella is suitably gaudy and I deliver the tour with panache.

And if the punters want more trivia;

I liked this charity penny chute on the external railings of St Barnabas 

Future Inspiration

Book - Tales from the Colony Rooms - Darren Coffield

Walk Details

Previous Hidden London Walks;

Mayfair, 

Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury

Distance - 4 miles

Geocaches - 21

Walk Inspiration - London's Hidden Walks - Book 1 - Walk 3