Atlantica - 01.11.2000, Side 26

24 A T L A N T I C A
I
was just 18 when I travelled abroad
on my own for the first time, with a
couple of friends. We went to
London and spent a week tramping
the Kings Road and Oxford Street in
true tourist fashion. And like any other
healthy, red-blooded young males we
paid a visit to Soho to peep through a
hole in the wall as a shockingly poor
specimen of British womanhood
removed her clothes. In my memory
this was a squalid area where insalu-
brious types hung around on street
corners trying to lure passers-by into
shady dives to feast their eyes on the
glories of naked female flesh. We didn’t
linger but scurried back to the comfort-
ing security of Leicester Square’s
tourist hordes.
This was 1986 when Soho was still
one of the sleaziest districts in the city
on the banks of the Thames. But the
authorities had already started a clean-
up campaign. Ten years earlier, strip
bars, peep shows and sex shops stood
almost back to back on the larger
streets and the general public hardly
dared to venture into the area after
dark. Then in the late eighties there
was an 80 per cent reduction in
businesses linked to the sex industry
and Soho managed to shake off its
sordid image. Today the area is home
to some of the best restaurants, pubs
and night clubs in London. Admittedly,
there is still the odd strip bar and sex-
aid shop – but perhaps that’s not a bad
thing in this insomniac part of town.
Soho would seem too sterile without
its quota of sleaze.
Soho is bordered by Oxford Street,
Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue
and the Charing Cross Road. Strange
but true, where Soho now stands there
were once rich hunting grounds and it
is from these that the area derives its
name; “Soho” is believed to have been
a hunting cry. By the by, it’s interesting
to note that its New York namesake
was not christened after Soho in
SOHO
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