London: The Biography

There are deeper continuities, too, since the area had a reputation for its cuisine long before it was ever populated. In 1598 Stow wrote of the conduit in Soho Fields that “The Lord Mayor, aldermen, and many worshipful persons rode to the conduit … according to custom, and then they went and hunted a hare before dinner and killed her; and thence went to dinner at the banqueting house at the head of the conduit, where a great number were handsomely entertained by the chamberlain.” So the air of dining and conviviality has always been part of the neighbourhood. On the same patch of ground where sixteenth-century dignitaries ate, the modern traveller can still dine at the Gay Hussar, Quo Vadis or L’Escargot.

There was a parish located here by 1623, and in 1636 certain people were described as living at “the brick kilns near Soho,” but the area first began to flourish in the 1670s when Gerrard Street, Old Compton Street, Greek Street and Frith Street emerged as part of a development north of Leicester Fields. A proclamation from the Court, dated as early as April 1671, forbade the erection of “small cottages and other tenements” in “the windmill Fields, Dog Fields and the fields adjoining So-Hoe” but, as usual, the social and commercial imperatives of the city over-ruled royal proclamations.

How Soho itself acquired its “raffish” flavour is obscure. The area just to its east, beside St. Martin’s Lane, was already inhabited by artists or artisans who catered to the rich or the fashionable. Art studios and art schools also began to cluster there, alongside the inevitable taverns and coffee houses. But they did not directly affect Soho itself. A sudden influx of French residents was of more consequence. In the area of Newport Market and Old Compton Street it was remarked by Maitland that “many parts of the parish abound with French, so that it is an easy matter for a stranger to fancy himself in France.” By 1688 over eight hundred of the empty and newly built houses had been filled with Huguenots, who characteristically transformed the ground floors into “genuine French shops,” cheap cafés and restaurants “like those near ‘the barrier’ in Paris.” So by degrees this emerging region of London came to be compared with the French city. It maintained that ambience for more than 150 years, and as late as 1844 Soho was still being described as “a sort of petty France.” It was recorded that “Most of the shops are thoroughly French, and they evidently have been established solely for the supply of the foreign colony. Here are French schools for the education of the young, and wine-shops and restaurants where an Englishman who entered would be looked on with surprise.” Perhaps the most notable institution, in the early days of twenty-first-century Soho, is the York Minster or French Pub known colloquially as “the French”; it is said to have been the meeting-place of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Again a small area of London, no more than a few streets and a market, has retained its traditional culture for more than three hundred years.

But the presence of the French immigrants in a place where the arrival of an Englishman would be a “surprise,” in turn created an odd air of strangeness or unfamiliarity which encouraged natives of other countries to feel more secure in its environs. In certain respects it was not English. “Of all quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London,” Galsworthy wrote in The Forsyte Saga, “Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit… Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic.” From the start it was a mixed area, both in terms of demography and of trade. “This district,” according to one Handbook, “is also a principal rendezvous for foreigners in London, many of whom here ply their avocations as artists and mechanics.” There were emporia of furniture acquired from various eras and various cultures, curiosity shops filled with multifarious relics of the Romans or the Habsburgs, musical-instrument makers and print-sellers, china manufacturers, booksellers and taverns where artists and literary gentlemen gathered. Modern institutions, such as the French Pub and the Colony Room Club, still attract poets and painters.