One place we can go: inside Soho’s eternal café

sir – I concur entirely with your inclusion of Bar Italia as one of the 50 greatest cafés on Earth (Travel, September 15). Jarvis Cocker, that great sardonic observer of humanity, did posterity a service by committing to song Soho’s eternal café which never sleeps.

However, I would take issue with Chris Moss’s charge of Soho having been “gentrified into oblivion”. Soho was London’s traditional bohemian district (the haunt of Huguenot artisans, musicians and absin the inspired poets for centuries) long before the flesh merchants and purveyors of faux sexuality partly ruined it. Frith Street, with Ronnie Scott’s opposite Bar Italia, was long its last bastion against encroaching cultural barbarianism.

The perpetual run of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the nearby Palace Theatre, with the subsequent pop-up mini-museum, may mean that in decades to come Soho will be best known for flocks of people in wizard robes, rather than dirty macs. Mark Boyle

Johnstone, Renfrewshire