Can the area regain its boho soul?
Rowan Pelling talks to filmmaker Aro Korol about the decline of London’s anarchic underbelly – and how it might be saved
The harbingers of the apocalypse seem to sweep through Soho as I walk down Berwick Street Market with film-maker Aro Korol and clubland style iconoclast Philip Sallon. The sky has turned a sullen ochre as Storm Ophelia blasts its way through London. Stall-holders turn their faces up to the syphilitic firmament: “Behold, the end of days!”, says a bloke buying fruit. Which seems apt when the mission in hand is to discuss Korol’s documentary Battle of Soho. The director believes we are witnessing the terminal decline of old-style boho Soho and unless we act now, the joyful, smutty, anarchic underbelly of London will be lost forever.
When I first heard about the documentary, I presumed it would be a cliquey affair, showcasing TV types and sozzled regulars of infamous drinking haunt The French House. But Polishborn Korol brings an outsider’s eye to the gradual ousting of eccentrics, gay clubbers and creative types from their traditional sanctuary. His subjects aren’t household names (apart from Stephen Fry’s pop-up appearance) so much as fringe performers, galvanised to protest about their displacement, whose greatest work of art is their own personality.
Style maven Sallon is very much a key voice in Battle of Soho, filmed making his maverick’s progress in full Vivienne Westwood regalia. He was a leading light at Covent Garden’s era-defining Blitz club nights in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and helped open another nightclub, Planets, with Boy George as DJ. Sallon talks at lightning speed, brooking no interruption, mourning the fact that “There might be a soul that’s disappearing from Soho – a seedy soul and different sort of togetherness, like everyone being in prison together.”
Protests against the remodelling of the area have been rumbling along for a while. In 2014, I marched alongside Soho prostitutes, local residents and Father Simon Buckley, the rector of St Anne’s Church, to protest the heavyhanded eviction of the area’s longestablished sex workers (a struggle not captured by Korol’s film). For several years there’s been an official Save Soho campaign, with a committee stuffed full of celebs and influential types, yet none of the doughty non-famous souls from the long-established Soho Society. It’s hard to find anyone who isn’t dismayed by the destruction wrought by Crossrail, leaving unsightly high-rise development in its place. Then there’s the threatened closure of The Curzon Soho – scene of so many a West End romance.
Korol finds on-screen inspiration in those who believe in sustained, noisy, on-street action. He documents the group who squatted the 12 Bar Club in Denmark Street (named “the second-best venue in the world” by The Daily Telegraph in 2012) after it was closed down and who tried to stop developers moving in – to no avail. Rather more successful were the performers and customers who lobbied Camden Council after The Black Cap (a mecca for drag acts) was closed and the developers tried to push through a change in usage. The Black Cap’s devotees are now trying to crowdfund the purchase of the building to keep it flamboyant for all eternity.
One question the film inevitably raises is whether we are romanticising the past. But even the most cynical Soho habitués, accustomed to the loss of what they love, feel things have got out of hand in the past few years. For many, the final insult was the closure of Madame Jojo’s, the spiritual home of Soho’s burlesque, cabaret and drag acts. Yes, there was an insalubrious incident involving an angry customer flinging bottles at the bouncers, who responded with baseball bats. But the club fired the company who organised door staff and were eager to comply with police and local regs. For those still mourning the Colony Room, once the preferred drinking haunt of Francis Bacon, Peter O’toole and Lucian Freud, it was a kick in the groin too many. And many a literary type found their heart broken this year when a huge hike in rent meant The Society Club was forced to shut its doors. Where else could you find a cocktail bar selling first editions of decadent literature run by a voluptuous blonde with five club dogs and a penchant for poetry nights?
As we wander Soho’s streets and alleys, it becomes clear that the three of us experience different versions of the place. For Korol, it’s an inclusive metropolitan underbelly for creative types, LGBT people and sundry oddballs. Sallon is still justly celebrated as a leading light of the New Romantic movement and remains a figurehead for unrepentant dandies everywhere; he can barely move without someone stopping to chat, or take his photo. Whereas for me, the lure is the mythical Soho I read about as a student, in novels such as Adrift in Soho, Colin Wilson’s portrayal of the British Beat Generation, and Patrick Hamilton’s elegy to the area’s pubs, The Midnight Bell.
After our walk, I take Korol and Sallon to my spiritual home, the tiny first-floor Academy Club in Lexington Street, set up by the print dealer and restaurateur Andrew Edmunds and the late writer Auberon Waugh. Sallon instantly approves the rickety staircase and uneven floors. While we order drinks, he stares at the 18th-century prints on the wall and declares they’re hung too neatly. The barmaid confesses she has just set them straight. With a glint in his eye, Sallon leaps on to a banquette and sets about making them crooked again. He turns to me and says, “Philip revels in imperfection (can you write that one down?).”
Korol’s documentary puts this kind of idiosyncrasy centre stage. His point is that Soho is the kind of place where
‘People come to London not to go to a Pret or to Boots, people come to London because there’s such a buzz’
anyone can parade their true self. But he doesn’t see Soho as unique, so much as emblematic of all the seductive fringe places that are gradually being eroded. Battle of Soho flits through other London demi-mondes that are facing sanitisation, including Brixton, Vauxhall and Camden.
And he doesn’t just interview the kooks and kinksters. Soho Estates, the property company set up by the late “King of Soho” Paul Raymond, which owns a large swathe of the area, is given a voice, as well as entrepreneurs such as club maestro Alex Proud (“I pay more tax than Starbucks!”) and designer Joe Corré.
Foreign investors, corporate greed and short-sighted politicians are blamed for the area’s makeover, but no one admits to being part of the process of gentrification. Not even the hipster who establishes a glitzy new private members’ club and talks about “a beautiful bit of prime estate” without irony. And no one satisfactorily answers John James of Soho Estates when he says that even if he halved rents, tenants would sell on their lease at the market rate and pocket the profit. In other words, it’s complicated and perhaps we’re all a bit complicit.
Above all, the film shows the viewer they have choices. Korol is at pains to point out that sustained challenges can result in victories. I recently heard that India Jane Rose, granddaughter of Raymond, will soon reopen Madame Jojo’s. If so, this is a canny move.
Korol and his interviewees are, for the most part, amazed that the London planners and corporate developers don’t seem to see they are killing the campy goose that lays the golden eggs. As the gorgeous drag queen Virgin Xtravaganzah puts it: “People come to London not to go to a Pret or to Boots, people come to London because there’s such a buzz here, so much being created and art blossoming everywhere.”
This is true and I left my screening feeling preservation orders should be slapped on Xtravaganzah, Sallon, and every glittering misfit celebrated in the film. And who will make that happen, if not we: the would-be citizens of Bohemia?
Battle of Soho will be screened in selected London cinemas from Saturday: battleofsoho.com. Audiences can also go to ourscreen.com to set up their own screening of the film