My first ever Saturday job was helping my dad’s mate out in his bespoke tailoring shop in Soho. 1970. I was 14. And ran lots of errands and stuff, as my tailoring skills weren’t quite honed yet. In fact they never were, I can’t sew on a button. But I wasn’t there to stand with a tape measure round my neck and a piece of tailor’s chalk in my hand, I was there to gather, collect, deliver and buy coffees for those whose skills with a piece of cloth were legendary. If you were into that sort of thing.

And Soho, to a naive but overly-hormonal, post-pubescent teenager, was something of an eye opener. And tongue-dropper.

Originally London’s French Quarter, we fortunately managed to get rid of that population centuries ago and in their place came Italians, Jews and hookers. With the latter being the dominant influence. Thus Soho’s image in the 60s and 70s was ‘sleaze central’. Where better for a young boy to go exploring?

Because of the Italian influence, Soho was about the only place where you could buy a ‘coffee’ that was as we know it now. Everywhere else in England it would be a styrofoam cup filled with Nescafe and cold milk. In Soho they made proper, frothy, hubble-bubble, steamy Cappuccinos in monster machines shipped over from Italy.

And there was sex. But so much sex that Berwick Street made Amsterdam look like the Vatican. Every other store was a sex shop. Windows full of books, whips, inflatables (no, not fucking dinghies, but fuckable blow-up dolls), costumes, fetishwear and all sorts of bizarre and rather beautiful stuff. It was all on open display. So groups of teenagers could stand there in shock.

As well as the sex shops there were the sleazy strip joints, the more ‘upmarket’ sex clubs (all terms relative) and on the upper floors of virtually every shop was a brothel. Other than our ‘cutting room’ which shared its stairway with about 653 hookers. All of whom were lovely, friendly, cor-blimey, wanna-good-time-darling?, get’cher’ands’offer-me, proper English tarts. No slaves from Albania, no crack whores from Bradford, just super girls who enjoyed their work. (I did say I was naive, didn’t I?).

Raymond’s Review Bar was the first place in Britain to allow naked women to move on stage. Before that, ‘impersonating a statue of a nude’ was, for some puritanical reason, acceptable, but as soon as anything jiggled, you’d get your collar felt by the law. Difficult when you’re not wearing a collar. Good fun for the police though.

Soho always attracted artists of every type. Its where London’s music scene started, hence all the record companies started there, it was and is a focus for jazz, for painters, for the movie business, but above all this, for sex. So even though they now have the ‘evils of modern society’ (Starbucks, Boots, Sainsburys Local, etc, etc) plus a zillion upmarket restaurants, Soho has still retained its wonderful feeling of edginess.

And now Paul Raymond’s granddaughter wants to modernise the dirty little alleyway that houses her grandpa’s palace. Do away with the few remaining brothels there, tidy up, get rid of the vibrators, sweep up the syringes. And that’s awful. Paul Raymond managed to buy most of Soho with the proceeds of his sex shows and this ungrateful spoiled little bitch wants to accelerate the ruination of one of London’s true remaining treasures. Probably turn the Review Bar into a Zara or Next. Just what we (faaaarkin) need.

You can get 100-1 on Arsenal winning the league. That must be worth a fiver of anyone’s money. Or you could burn that fiver and scatter those ashes at White Hart Lane. Same difference.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx