I’d like to share a few Soho secrets...
Christopher Howse has a life-long passion for this bohemian London enclave – a place he hopes will soon spring back to life
The best way to approach Soho is on foot down Flitcroft Street. It immediately gets behind the facades.
Flitcroft Street is too narrow for traffic and begins at the church of St Giles in the Fields (1734), designed by Henry Flitcroft. It was the first in London built in the Palladian style. In those days this was a poor, lousy, criminal rookery of a neighbourhood.
By the footway a grand gateway opens into the churchyard with a relief carving above it of the Second Coming of Christ, bursting upon a graveyard like the real one here, but with the dead pushing out, lively as worms on wet grass, sprung from their tombs, resurrected.
Halfway down the alley, before the stage door of the Phoenix Theatre, stands the wonderful Elms Lesters Painting Rooms. Red brick with a narrow green door three storeys high, it was built in 1903 for painting stage scenery, up to a size of 50ft by 30ft.
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Across Charing Cross Road lies the high street of Soho, Old Compton Street, which the local layabouts and ne’er-dowells I knew in the 1980s always called Compton Street, as though it had recently been opened. On the right hand or sunny side is the Vintage House, an old-fashioned off-licence with bare floorboards and a remarkable choice of burgundies and bordeaux. The most endearing sight from the shop is the old parlour out the back, with armchairs beside the hearth, but all piled round with boxes of wine, as though a suburban house had been overwhelmed by energetic smugglers.
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Soho has its smells, but few nicer than in I Camisa, the Italian deli further along on the left. It’s a mixture of prosciutto being cut, bags of fresh basil, olives, cheese, coffee, sausage, pimento and raisins.
The narrow little shop is not designed for coronavirus, and I long to see the busy, motherly assistants freely at work again in their white overall coats rapidly preparing orders for knowledgeable customers.
Another secret is that I stands for Isidoro, but he’s long dead.
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Maison Bertaux, next to the Coach & Horses in Greek Street, is not in itself secret, having traded since 1871, but one secret of enjoying it is to come in the quiet of the morning to be warmed by the sun as you sit outside with a coffee and bit of fruit tart.
The place is pleasantly ramshackle because Michele Wade, the proprietrix, to whom its continuing existence is entirely due, has never had the money
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I would like once again to treat the Bar Italia, one street to the west, in Frith Street, as I always have, as a place for a quick, strong, absurdly expensive espresso. Opposite the big black-andwhite poster behind the bar of Rocky Marciano, tall stools with footrests grow out of the terrazzo, with enough room to tuck your knees under a shelf for the coffee cup. The customers do not look as dangerous as they once did, though being dangerous need not mean acting unpleasantly. At Christmas there was always a glass of sweet liqueur on the house.
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One members’ club not smothered by fitted carpets is the House of St Barnabas, on the corner of Soho Square. A stupendous Georgian building from the 1740s, with a wide stone staircase, it ministered for fallen women. Since there are no fallen women any more, it has come up with a scheme for our times: training homeless people in cooking, waiting and restaurant administration. Among the things I like here is
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I don’t want to be unduly nostalgic for times when there were, in truth, plenty of horrible pubs, coffee bars, clip joints and red-lighted staircases, but I do miss the butchers. My old friend Graham Mason, the drunkest man in the Coach & Horses, used to swear by one right down Brewer Street. It was nicknamed the Solicitors because the unwieldy name above the door was Slater & Cooke, Bisney & Jones. Marsh Dunbar, the woman he lived with, preferred the snugger Randall & Aubin at the end of Brewer Street, which is now a seafood brasserie.
In the marbly, black and white floored Hammett’s in Rupert Street, Jeffrey Bernard took a series of photos of the straw-hatted butcher cutting through a hanging pig’s carcass from tail to chops. That was for the book he did with Frank Norman, Soho Night & Day. Fenns in Berwick Street sold game. Bifulco in Old Compton Street boasted “English and Scotch Meat”. I used Portwine’s, which had been at Seven Dials for 200 years. Every one of them is gone. You have to go as far as Marylebone High Street now.
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To consolidate the pleasures of melancholy, try Soho Square. An excellent photo by Daniel Farson showed Jeffrey Bernard as a young man sitting at the foot of the statue of Charles II there, head in hands, deep in a hangover and merited self-pity. In 1681, when the square was being built, the statue was carved by Caius Gabriel Cibber (whose son, Colley Cibber, the playwright, Pope made a star dunce in The Dunciad).
The statue weathered badly and some enterprising soul cemented on a new face, with much the effect as one of those restorers of sacred murals in a Spanish church. No matter, it is a still grand piece of rockery next to the curious oak-beamed cottage that is really the gardener’s lock-up.
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Out of the rain, a good browse at Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road is part of the round of the Soho day. I used to tumble down the steep steps into the bargain cellar between pub closing at three o’clock and reopening at half-past five. The shop had the good fortune to come into the ownership of Gillian McMullan in 2019. She once wrote a thesis on Mrs Oliphant, so her interest is not only in the price of books. Heaven knows how she’s done during lockdown, but there is a website.
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The French pub, which Jeffrey Bernard’s poet eldest brother, Oliver, insisted on calling by its old name, the York Minster, is now the French House, neither the one nor the other. It benefited from cigarette smoke, through which the afternoon sun beamed, making clouds of glory. Crowded as a Tube train, it harboured men who still drank wearing a hat and raincoat.
Of course you might see Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud there, but much more often the aggressive photographer Harry Diamond, the tiresome publisher Jay Landesman or the champion bore Tony Harris. Evasive navigation was imperative.
But I should love to stand at the bar again or sit in the rather too expensive restaurant upstairs. As for secrets: one used to be able to see the time by the clock of St Anne’s, Soho, while standing at the gents’ in the basement. That was of very little use, but it always made me feel at home.