Sign up to emails. Subscribe to Byline Times. Cycling around Soho yesterday, even though we know why, I was still amazed to see a ghost town. Almost everything was shut. Even the Soho House private members club was boarded up. I also felt a certain nostalgia for old Soho. And I know exactly what it was like. The following year, I opened the Wag Club in Wardour Street that ran six nights a week for almost 19 years, and I lived there until I still find myself knocking about Soho at least three times a week.
My Soho nightspot the Wag Club was more than a club. The march of gentrification, corporatization and overwhelming greed has changed Soho beyond recognition. In the 80s chain restaurants did not want to be anywhere near Soho. Neither did PR companies or posh hotels while city boys only visited there for hookers or to throw up. They would never have dreamt of living in the vicinity.
It was named Soho after a hunting and war cry. The area was woodland until it became a sought after place to live after the Great Fire of Soho also attracted criminals; highwayman, pickpockets, burglars. While many areas of London floundered during the First and Second World Wars, Soho thrived as every soldier spent freely in its bars, bordellos and betting dens before shipping out to be shot at. Gangsters have long fought over Soho. Clerkenwell born Darby Sabini and his hundred-strong mob-controlled Soho from the s until in when Sabini was interned as an Italian enemy alien.
Eugenio Messina and his brothers controlled the Soho sex trade before and after the Second World War. But after they both were deported the crown was passed onto another Maltese born gangster.
The illicit sex trade rocketed when prostitution was made illegal in under a Conservative government of course. By the 70s there were more than thirty strip clubs in Soho, as well as countless porno bookshops and cinemas, clip joints and peep shows.
