Along with heatwaves, keeping the small boats “invasion” story going and unravelling a Cambridge professor, media herd attention this silly season has been captured by a campaign to save the “spirit of Soho” as those involved perceive it and, indeed, that of the West End as a whole.
Such campaigns have been mounted before and the current one has been ongoing for a few years, varying in focus and intensity but always driven by the same insistence that the endangered spirit in question can only be kept from harm if more and more people consume more and more alcohol in Soho, including outdoors on the streets at dead of night.
The current “save Soho” salvo has been remarkable for several reasons. One is its accumulation of unusual unanimities, with liberal Left and libertarian Right denouncing as one those they deem enemies of British revelry. Another is its nostalgia for the pandemic. A third is its agglomeration of questionable assertions, the most prominent of which have been as follows:
- Soho is a dedicated late night entertainment district whose special magic a puritanical Westminster Council wants to destroy with a proposed “ban” on people drinking alcohol while standing up.
- A local charity and amenity group wields undue influence over Westminster’s decisions in these areas and has newly vowed to oppose the granting of every application for a licence made to Westminster’s licensing committee.
- Soho residents who object to noise in the streets late at night are joyless newcomers to the area who should have known when they chose to live in Soho that it is a late night entertainment district and therefore deserve no sympathy.
- Sir Sadiq Khan is acquiring powers that will enable him to revive on a permanent basis the temporary periods of outdoor dining that revived the fading “spirit of Soho” during the pandemic.
All of the claims above are either inaccurate, exaggerated or both. Yet all have been doing a roaring trade in recent weeks, thanks primarily to the endeavours of Britain’s largest liberal-Left news organisation, London’s liberal-Left Mayor and the herd’s hunger for emotive “talking points”.
The onslaught has proceeded in the context of a wider debate about the future of the West End, much of it concerned with Mayor Khan’s desire to pedestrianise a large part of Oxford Street and the implications of so doing. Step back a few more paces and it also encompasses major trends such as increasing online retail, more working from home, changing consumer tastes and rising commercial rents.
This, then, is a time for the careful weighing of evidence, for clarity of vision and for a search for consensus about how best to guide the evolution of the West End, a part of central London whose economic output, based on one definition of the area, is estimated to be a good £55 billion a year, representing roughly three per cent of that of the entire United Kingdom, and all of it produced from an area of about seven square miles or 0.0075 per cent of the nation’s land mass.
Instead we’ve had a foreground frenzy of outrage, indignation, culture war scapegoating and confected rows. You might therefore never know that the West End has more workers in professional, scientific and technical occupations than in its accommodation and food service sector, and more in information and communications roles than in retail or in arts and entertainment.
Or that thousands of people live there. Or that its different components have evolved over time to form an intricate urban ecosystem that rewards subtle and responsive stewardship. Or that the coming transformation of Oxford Street and its environs present both a large opportunity to enhance the West End’s blend of strengths and a significant risk of harming them.
THE NIGHTLIFE POPULIST FRONT
Recent “save Soho” furies have arisen partly from a longing to return to a feature of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Those often bleak and fearful months were brightened for some by Westminster deciding from June 2020 to help its hard-hit hospitality sector survive by closing more than a dozen streets to motor traffic and allowing restaurants, pubs and bars to put tables out on the pavements and the roads.
Although Covid-19 restrictions were still in effect, sitting outside meant people could adhere to them while also dining and imbibing. Soho was not the only part of Westminster to see such changes – they happened in Covent Garden and St John’s Wood too. But Soho, being Soho, was where they got noticed most.
The al fresco dining period was a big success for those who partook of and made money from it. Some dubbed it a “revolution” that brought a welcome continental quality to central London streets. When the scheme was extended from 30 September 2020 until the end of October, fans rejoiced. And the following year, with Covid still in the air, al fresco resumed.
Come autumn 2021, Westminster decided it would become a permanent feature elsewhere, but with Soho things were different. There, many people wanted life to return to normal. Some described having to keep their windows closed because of the higher volume of noise outside and men urinating outside their front doors. The road closures were ended.
As Charles Wright reported for On London at the time, hospitality businesses that had seen business boom under al fresco protested. And a chorus of derision was directed at residents’ objections to its continuation: “You chose to live in Soho, what did you expect?”
It was an attack line with legs. A year later, it was still going strong, now aimed at Westminster’s licensing policy and with a political edge. A GB News producer and Daily Express columnist, Charlotte Gill, called for longer and later opening hours for pubs and clubs. Her advice to unhappy residents was frank: “If you don’t like it, move.”
Gill elaborated: “Imagine choosing to live in Soho and worrying about your sleep. Like moving to the North Pole and crying that it’s cold.” This formula, too, would recur. So would Gill’s economic argument, delivered with an ageist barb: “We’ve got to close up the centre of the UK economy because a boomer in Soho needs their sleep.”
By that time, and since May 2022, Westminster Council was Labour-run – the first time in its history it had not been in Conservative hands. It wasn’t long before London Tories, sensing an opportunity as the May 2024 election for Mayor of London appeared on the horizon, took up the cry that the capital’s nightlife was being ruined.
They, however, did not pick on Westminster’s licensing policy as a cause, perhaps mindful that although Labour was now running the borough, the policy of that time had been drawn up and adopted in 2021 by fellow Tories. Instead they framed it as a law and order issue across London as a whole. It meant they could heap blame on Khan and Amy Lamé, the Mayor’s “night czar”, responsible for “ensuring London thrives as a 24-hour city”.
The Tories’ lead prosecutor of the case that the caged forces of London carousing should be set free was their mayoral candidate Susan Hall, a near-septuagenarian whose sometimes scolding demeanour and authoritarian leanings did not best equip her for championing party animals.
However, following Hall’s comfortable defeat by Khan in May 2024, a report released later in the year by her London Assembly Tory group colleague Emma Best, while also stressing policing, complained that West End pubs and bars shut too early and urged the Mayor to lobby London’s local authorities to “support hospitality venues”.
Then, in May of this year – as it happens just three weeks after the Conservatives regained control of Westminster – the call for West End licensing rules to become more permissive achieved political crossover.
The Guardian took up the cry. First, it ran a story in which Rupert Power, chair of the Soho Business Alliance, alleged that the Soho Society could (in Power’s reported words) “destroy Soho’s reputation on the international stage” by (in the Guardian article’s words) “ferociously objecting to all new bar and restaurant licences”.
Ferociously! One unnamed source, described as a bar owner who was also a Soho Society member, claimed the society had “a blanket policy to say ‘no'” to licensing applications, and that it had secured a “mandate” for this policy at its annual general meeting held a few days earlier, helped by “mafia-like” intimidation.
Two days later, Mayor Khan joined the fray. A further Guardian piece said he had “suggested he will overrule a residents’ society that has vowed to challenge all new applications for pubs and restaurants in Soho”. The latter reference was to new powers, trailed at a press conference at Ronnie Scott’s in May 2025 and expected to be conferred on City Hall later this year. “The move could mean bars opening later and more alfresco dining,” the Guardian article said. It also quoted Khan saying, “the Soho Society’s decision to oppose all new and extended licence applications is the wrong one”.
The Mayor continued to weigh in. In June, he took to X/Twitter to echo, with added sarcasm, the line previously deployed by Charlotte Gill: “Complaining about nightlife when you *checks notes* choose to live in Soho is like living in South Kensington and complaining about the museums.”
Then, earlier this month, the Guardian unleashed the notion that Westminster Council was bent on putting an end to what is termed (not only by Westminster) “vertical drinking”. Although the report accurately quoted the most relevant clause from the draft new licensing policy, it also described the draft as recommending “not allowing” standing “or ordering at the bar”.
The Mayor’s office supplied a supportive quote: “This is more evidence that restrictive and anti-growth policies aren’t working.” His anticipated new call-in powers were welcomed in the statement for meaning he could help “protect London’s vital nightlife and hospitality industries”.
Initially, the Guardian article’s headline claimed the council wanted to “ban standing”. On its website, the word “ban” was replaced later in the day with the word “limit”. But the “ban on standing” hare was off and running and there was no stopping it.
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS
In these ways, a novel combination of media and political forces has constructed a combustible narrative about Soho and the core West End, drawn up battle lines and identified enemies within from which the area’s special magic must be defended.
The alien foe is those presumed rich nimby killjoys who’ve moved into Soho and are now, in league with an anti-fun and anti-growth council, waging war on its very essence, on that of London’s upright drinkers and, indeed, on a signature British tradition. The seed of hope is that Soho might yet be saved by Sir Sadiq, the goodly nightlife knight.
The only drawback with this narrative is that most of it is fanciful or wrong. The Soho Society has been traduced. Its pursuers seem unconcerned that it has rebutted claims that it has a “blanket policy to say no” to all licensing applications submitted to Westminster, adding that in 2025 it “considered 140 Soho-related licensing applications and submitted representations on 45”. My inquiries suggest that although the “blanket policy” claim might have been supplied to the Guardian in good faith, it arose from a misunderstanding. Whatever, no such policy has been adopted.
Responding to the first of the string of claims in the Guardian, the Soho Society wrote to the news organisation saying it was “not the case” that it had “adopted a policy of objecting to every licensing application in Soho” and had never had such a policy. The letter directly challenged a key ingredient of the Guardian’s coverage. It wasn’t published. Neither has the article been amended to reflect it.
The matter came up during Mayor’s Question Time on 16 July. In exchanges we will return to, the Mayor was challenged by the Conservative London Assembly member Neil Garratt, who said the Soho Society AGM had in fact agreed “a restatement of the existing policy” at its May AGM.
What was existing policy? A mandate was secured in 2015 to object to applications by premises “that wish to trade beyond core hours” and to “all new” ones for bars, nightclubs and music venues but not other premises that need licences (restaurants aren’t mentioned). It appears to have endured. But it does not amount to objecting to “all new applications for bars and restaurants in the area”. The society told the BBC of its concern that “the intensification of the night time economy in Soho has not been matched by an equivalent increase in infrastructure needed to safely accommodate such growth.”
Responding to Garratt, the Mayor, consulting his notes, said that the Soho Society’s “most recent policy” was a “blanket objection and a blanket challenge to all new late night applications and all existing licences for bars and restaurants” which was partly right and partly not. The Mayor and his advisers are busy people, so perhaps can be forgiven for having not taken on board the Soho Society’s letter to the Mayor, dated 14 July, taking exception to remarks he had made about it and saying, as it had to the Guardian, that “the society does not automatically oppose every licensing application”.
Fine distinctions? Arguably. But how much power does the Soho Society actually have? Founded in 1972, it is well-organised, well-informed and one of numerous local organisations in Westminster that take a close interest in planning and licensing issues and can be influential. It has long been consulted by the council about planning applications and makes representations on licensing when so moved. Note that a representation is not necessarily, or even ordinarily, a demand for a rejection. It can, for example, be a plea for pre-empting or dealing with possible unwanted effects of an application as a condition of it being granted.
The Soho Society is not what the Licensing Act of 2003 calls as a “responsible authority”, a number of which must by law be alerted if someone wants permission to sell alcohol, or indeed provide hot food or drink between 11pm and 5am, or put on what is defined as “regulated entertainment”, such as live music, movies or plays. “Responsible authorities” in Greater London include the Home Office, the London Fire Brigade and, most importantly, the Metropolitan Police. At MQT, Neil Garratt pointed out that objections to licensing applications in Westminster most often come from the Met.
Westminster Council’s draft new licensing policy has been misrepresented too. The reporting of it has suggested some new and monstrous imposition, yet the draft’s “core hours” position and its stance on “vertical drinking” are the same as contained in the outgoing policy, adopted in 2021, the one before that, adopted in 2016, and previous ones this century.
Were it designed, as the Guardian has implied, to bring an end to people simultaneously standing up and consuming alcohol, whether inside a pub or on the pavement outside, and to outlaw the ordering of drinks at the bar, you’d expect it to have done the job by now. I was in Soho a week ago and before that during the World Cup. On neither occasion was “vertical drinking” absent from the scene. Far from it.
Another hitch with the histrionics is the suggestion that the powers over licensing coming Mayor Khan’s way will revive al fresco dining in Soho. But licensing powers to not cover whether or not restaurants can serve meals on pavements or public highways or enable the closure of roads. Westminster has lost control of Oxford Street to Transport for London, but it remains the highway authority for the Soho streets in question.
And so, we come to a fourth strand of the “save Soho” narrative, one that is both ignorant and rather ungracious. Neil Garratt became a subscriber to it, qualifying his MQT defence of the Soho Society by observing of it, “I don’t think anyone has much time for people who move to Soho and then complain about noise”. But the assumption that Soho residents with concerns about noise or any other issues connected with the area’s night time life have only just turned up is as flawed as it is ubiquitous.
Soho is not, and never has been, purely an entertainment district. Its population has fallen sharply since World War 2, when perhaps 30,000 people lived there. The current number is somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500, depending to some extent where its boundary is drawn (for instance, some think of Chinatown as being part of Soho, others don’t). But many of them have been there for a long time.
Soho Society chair Tim Lord, for example, has lived in Soho for over 30 years. Wendy Hardcastle has been there since 1967. In the early 1970s, she became a leading light of a very different kind of “save Soho” campaign, launched when the area faced being radically redeveloped. At the time, she says, “it was pretty run down”. Some of the local flats had outside toilets and no bathroom, she recalls. She and her husband were luckier – they had a bath, but it was in the corridor between the kitchen and the bedroom.
That “save” campaign outlasted the development scheme and resulted in the creation of the Soho Society (of which Hardcastle is still a member) to continue to defend it against harm. It also led to the founding of the Soho Housing Association, which today, as Soho Housing, provides about 750 affordable homes in Westminster and Camden, of which about 500 are in the West End, primarily Soho and Covent Garden. A large majority of them are for social rent.
About three-quarters of the tenants are in work, many of them in part-time and low-paid jobs, the sorts of Londoners for whom the association was set up in the first place. Perhaps a third of the households include children. A significant number of their residents are elderly. Soho Housing’s chief executive Barbara Brownlee, who has previously served as Westminster’s executive director of growth, housing and planning, says that is because “quite a lot of the people who set the association up 50 years ago are still in it”.
Social housing tenants, including some who live in Westminster Council homes, account for a quarter or so of Soho’s resident population. Not everyone who lives in Soho is wealthy. Not all are newcomers. Yet some of those who want visitors to have more nightclubs and more drinking there tell those residents that if they are unhappy, they should put up with it or push off. Not very progressive.
WHICH SOHO? LEGENDS, SEDUCTIONS AND OMISSIONS
Earlier this month, I went to Soho on a Sunday morning. In Soho Square, people sat in the garden’s shaded parts, reading, quietly talking, reflecting. The loudest sound came from the bells of St Patrick’s Roman Catholic church, built at the junction with Sutton Row in the early 1890s.
I wandered down Greek Street, with its ground floor montage of shops, restaurants, offices and bars, turned at random into the narrow, tunnelled end of Manette Street, passed the blue entrance door of the 7 Greek Street flats and entered a pedestrianised space at the rear of Ilona Rose House, a new, pink, mixed-use development fronting on to Charing Cross Road built by Soho Estates, one of the area’s two big property owners (the other is Shaftesbury Capital, whose portfolio stretches from Carnaby Street to Chinatown to Covent Garden).
Ilona is the middle name of Fawn James, daughter of John James, who she succeeded as head of Soho Estates last year. Soho Estates is based at Ilona Rose House. The courtyard space is called James Court. On one side, the outdoor part of the Milk Beach restaurant was filling up with brunchers. On another, lit candles were being arranged in a sand tray for congregants arriving at the tiny entrance to the Macedonian Orthodox Church, located in St Barnabus Chapel. Inside, a plaque memorialised Henry Monro, a 19th Century physician and mental health campaigner.
Soho is historic and multifarious. On Brewer Street, the entrance to St James’s Residences has a bell panel with 60 buttons and a sign for the Soho Family Centre Nursery, part of the London Early Years Foundation group. The residences were bought by the Soho Housing Association in 1973, renovated, and the family centre founded.
The narrow Green’s Court offered a taco restaurant, a nail bar, “herbal viagra” and a barber shop, as well as Green’s Court, a residential block managed by the council-owned City West Homes. A middle-aged woman and her bicycle emerged from it. At the junction of Hopkins Street and Peter Street stood the Soho campus of Capital City College and looming beyond it, on Berwick Street, Kemp House, a council tower block completed in 1962.
All this variety and all those layers of change make you wonder what exactly the latest saviours of the “spirit of Soho” think that spirit is.
The original built-up Soho of the late 17th Century was a fashionable, upper-class residential area, founding features of which remain: Soho Square (main photo), laid out in the 1670s; St Anne’s Church, consecrated in 1686. It was cosmopolitan, too, and for a while known as London’s French quarter.
By the mid-18th Century, many of the posh had moved on to Mayfair as the West End’s development continued. In the mid-19th Century, a public water pump was identified by pioneer physician John Snow as the source of a major cholera outbreak (in 1992, a replica of it was erected on the spot of the original). The last of the aristocrats departed, but larger numbers of people replaced them, as many of its houses were partitioned into crowded tenements occupied by the Victorian poor.
The by now low-rent neighbourhood attracted what respectable society considered low-rent entertainment – theatres and music halls – along with prostitutes. In this disreputable and precarious social margin of central London, the seed of what many think of as “the spirit of Soho” was planted.
It is a notion prone to idealisations. These were resisted by Dominic Nolan in his 2021 novel Vine Street, which evokes the Soho of the 1930s, a place of poverty, exploitation and corruption. A much jollier portrayal, majoring on the area’s non-conformity and gastronomic internationalism, can be enjoyed in the 1955 newsreel below.
It is entitled, whether out of innocence or nudge-nudge design, Soho Goes Gay. And it is lovely. But it doesn’t touch upon the female sex workers who solicited on Soho’s streets (a practice outlawed a few years later) or the 100-odd strip clubs that were there too.
The 1963 movie The Small World of Sammy Lee painted an altogether bleaker picture of the Soho of that era (as well as providing a long view of the then freshly-completed Kemp House in its opening sequence). Hackney-born Anthony Newley plays Lee, a strip joint compere, gambler and ducker and diver in a down-at-heel outsiders’ domain.
Pleasingly, the film’s credits inform us that the office of the British Board of Film Censors was at No. 3 Soho Square. In its modern form as the British Board of Film Classification, it’s still there. Soho was the hub of the British movie industry. Wardour Street was known as “film row“.
Institutions of the “spirit” were getting established: in 1962, the Marquee Club, opened four years earlier, had hosted the first ever live performance by the Rolling Stones; Ronnie Scott’s had opened at its original home in a Gerrard Street basement in 1959 and moved to Frith Street in 1965.
The allure of that version of Soho, more swinging than seedy, more glamorous than grim, is very strong. I was a child from another world during that era, but it would infuse my imagined London and feed my desire to live here. Older friends and early mentors had inhabited its fabled haunts. One of them wrote Ronnie Scott’s biography.
But there are other portrayals. Tom Barling’s crime thriller The Smoke describes a Soho brutal with gangsters as well bright with men in frocks. Going into the 1970s, the corruption of the Met’s so-called dirty squad, which did more to protect the sex trade than prevent it, was breathtaking.
But Wendy Hardcastle and her friends were part of the picture too. They resisted all attempts to push or tempt them out. “We were not going to give up without a fight and individuals defended their blocks tenaciously,” she says. “The aim was always to provide improved housing standards for the families and workers who lived in the area and lived in very substandard accommodation at the time.”
In 1985, John Pitman made Soho the subject of one of his pioneering Just Another Day documentaries for the BBC. By then, Soho’s pop culture timeline was post-punk and into peak underground clubland. But as well as being a hive of nightlife, “London’s crooked square mile” was still also a place of primary schools, bespoke shoemakers, fixers of priceless violins and of pensioner day centres.
A couple of elderly Soho ladies told Pitman that in the old days, the girls “doing their trade” were “lovely”. It was a shame when they got murdered. There’s a nice line from the proprietor of a famed after hours drinking club, who said of Soho, “Well, of course, it isn’t what it used to be, but it never was what it was.”
Nostalgia for a Soho where decadence, nefariousness and outsider styles of life could be seen as interdependent aspects of a sacred, magical whole would later take the form of pining for the upsides of recession and decline. But one mindset’s loss of romantic and sometimes risky liberties can be another’s winning crusade against vice.
In 1994, the Met went on a “porn purge” in Soho amid concerns that the area was reverting to a sleazier, nastier past. New legal powers relating solely to the control of “sex establishments” in the City of Westminster were introduced two years later. At the same time, it was a sanctuary, what we would now call a “safe space” for gay socialising – safe, that was, except for a Friday evening in 1999 when a nail bomb planted by a neo-Nazi exploded in the Admiral Duncan pub on Old Compton Street and killed three people.
By this time, London’s population had begun to rise again after decades of tumbling. Its economy was on the up too. Recovery meant edgy twilight giving way to millennial renewal. From the late 20th Century, Westminster’s evening and night time economy grew fast and changed fast too, as its visitor economy boomed and evolved.
In 2004, another Soho clampdown got underway, with the council closing in on brothels and “clip joints”, the latter coining it at the expense of unwary and unworldly males. Who could possibly have complained? A group called The Sohemian Society did. According to its founders, Soho was a “spiritual” location, “a vortex of louche living, artistic creativity, cultural nonconformity and free expression”. One of them was quoted thus:
“The new puritans of Westminster city council will not be satisfied until they have transformed Soho into yet another bland, dreary residential area. So-called clip joints and brothels are an integral part of Soho’s life.”
Of course, far from becoming more residential, drearily or otherwise, Soho’s population was thinning out as London grew and gentrification advanced. Meanwhile, the 2003 Licensing Act had come into force. A Labour government initiative, it moved responsibility for licensing from magistrates to councils, gave more say over decisions to local communities but also created more freedoms and flexibilities for hospitality businesses.
Keen to modernise and civilise Britain’s drinking culture, the Act liberalised opening hours, bringing to an end of the age-old 11pm pub closing time. This was widely held to encourage drink-fuelled street crime (a “last orders” rush followed by mass exits, rowdiness and rucks). Section 4(2) set out four “licensing objectives” that local authorities were required to pursue:
- prevention of crime and disorder
- public safety.
- prevention of public nuisance.
- protection of children from harm.
Like those of every other local authority in England, Westminster Council’s licensing policies have been drawn up in keeping with those objectives (which became subject to revised guidance in February, stressing that they are “a paramount consideration at all times”).
Discouragement of “vertical drinking” in favour of more seating and table service reflect that as does the Soho Society’s stance on more and later-opening venues that sell alcohol. And Westminster isn’t alone in seeking to reshape its hospitality sector in ways that make it easier to control antisocial and criminal side-effects. These don’t only affect local residents, but also night time economy workers trying to get home, passers-by and pleasure-seekers themselves who can be easy prey for street criminals, especially if drunk. Sexual assaults on women can be especially prevalent in night time economy areas.
All of this helps explain why there has been growth in the number of restaurants in Soho (restaurants, by the way, produce much higher economic output than pubs, bars and nightclubs). The council’s draft new policy on “vertical drinking” – the one that isn’t new at all – needs to be understood in that light and as a continuation of decades of attempts to nourish and protect what is good about Soho and other West End neighbourhoods while suppressing and expunging what is not. The distinction is contested and its enforcement, difficult. Pretending otherwise is a luxury those responsible for such matters are denied.
The task remains exacting. In 2013, Westminster set up a commission – headed by Manchester City Council’s chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein – to look into the future of the West End. On its advice, a West End partnership was formed, with places on its board for business groups, the Met, City Hall, the London School of Economics, residents’ groups and the cultural sector as well as Westminster and Camden councils.
The partnership’s 2014 “vision” document listed as challenges air pollution and climate change, attaining greater financial autonomy and Business Rate reform, and, yes, “the growing demands of the night-time and tourist economy” which would require “renewed efforts to reduce noise pollution anti-social behaviour and criminal activities”.
In that same year came another “save Soho” cry. This was triggered by the closing of Madame Jojo’s, a cabaret and burlesque club on Brewer Street that had been going since 1986. Opened by Paul Raymond, the porn-publishing, strip club-owning founder of Soho Estates, it lost its licence, not because of local residents complaining but because of the Met, which pressed for closure following a violent incident outside. Mourners blamed gentrification. Stars came out in sympathy.
The episode serves as a case study for some of the balances that have to struck and the conflicts that have to be managed in Soho and other parts of the West End.
How do you permit, even treasure, the counter-cultural and exotic while also prohibiting the alcohol-led damage and disorder that can go with it? How do you both meet the demand for hedonism and prevent it leading to harm?
Those questions still arise, even though the make-up of Soho has been morphing. The Admiral Duncan is still with us, a stirring monument to a proud Soho tradition. But last October, the owner of the the G-A-Y bar on Old Compton Street announced that he was closing the venue, saying the street had lost it LGBT identity.
A friend who loves Soho and its history wonders to what extent the area still provides meeting places and entertainments that can’t be found elsewhere. After all, you can see drag acts at pubs in Leyton. One worry about Soho is that new and more numerous licensed venues would also be more uniform and mainstream, not very “spirit of Soho” at all.
And there are many more circles to square. “Soho has always had tensions,” says Barbara Brownlee. “It’s a tiny little place in the middle of Europe’s biggest capital where people live with their children and you can also drink until four in the morning.”
The fog of the fathead war about licensing policy has obscured this urban landscape of balances and accommodations. The Mayor’s contribution has been out of character. His council house upbringing is part of his brand and his affordable homes programme is skewed towards social rent supply. He has warned in the past against expensive parts of London becoming “hollowed out” by high housing costs. Today, Soho Parish primary school in Great Windmill Street is struggling to survive because of falling pupil numbers. Yet he has joined in with the mocking of Soho residents, many of whom are social housing tenants and as integral to the area’s character as its nightlife.
There have been other odd alignments and some telling disconnects. Soho Estates, chaired by the Khan-averse former Tory mayoral candidate Steve Norris, hoped out loud that Soho would be embraced by Khan’s mayoral development corporation (it wasn’t). Tim Lord, now at odds with the Labour Mayor, stood (unsuccessfully) for Labour in West End ward in May. “I think it’s really uncool for communities to be used as a political football by newspapers or politicians,” says Rachel Blake, Labour MP for Cities of London & Westminster, reacting to the heatwave headline-seeking.
Meanwhile, at City Hall, party lines are being followed and swords crossed accordingly. Last month’s exchanges between the Mayor and Neil Garratt are again instructive (watch below from 1 hour 18 mins).
Garratt’s line of questioning, in passing absolving while also slighting the Soho Society and Soho residents, came down to the recurring Tory case that the Mayor should cut City Hall spending in other areas and give more to the police. The Met, Garratt argued, had been objecting to late night licence applications because reducing the amount of nightlife activity was the best lever it had for making up for a shortage of resources. “High crime is the real reason why there’s a challenge getting late licences in Soho,” he said.
In reply, Khan echoed the Soho Society’s defence against his and the Guardian’s attacks by pointing out that it is Westminster’s licensing committee, not the Met, that takes licensing decisions. He went on to talk about the new Met “command cell” at Charing Cross police station and sharp drops in reports of phone thefts in the West End. (Live facial recognition technology is coming on stream too, as the beginning of Oxford Street’s partial pedestrianisation approaches).
But this battle over blame was fought on common ground. The Mayor and his Tory group opponent agree that the West End’s hospitality sector should face fewer barriers, agree that intensified policing should accompany this, and agreed that unhappy Soho locals have no business complaining about late night noise. They explored a difference of opinion within a shared conviction that a West End of round-the-clock eating, drinking and entertainment amid a larger police presence would mean progress. But in fairness to them both they surely know that a successful West End for a new London era will be about a lot more than that.
THE BEST WEST END
What sort of West End should be aimed for as London and the country strive for “good growth”, as the capital is besieged by the Trump-Farage propaganda mob, as its birthrate falls and its population ages, as its housing emergency intensifies, as its economy absorbs the impact of AI and as the planet fries? What ingredients add up to the right answer to that question? Who should decide what they are?
Among scholars of such matters, debate about the best form of governance for the West End and Central London as a whole has lately been refreshed. The OSDC is but the latest decision-making entity to crowd into an urban core where around a dozen others have jurisdiction, including TfL and, south of the river, the most northern bits of Lambeth (containing the South Bank Centre) and Southwark (containing Tate Modern).
Should it have a been much bigger, stretching from Paddington to Liverpool Street and from the Thames to Euston Road, instead of only from Tottenham Court Road station to Marble Arch? Should London’s Mayors, one way or the other, have much more control over a part of the city of such Londonwide and nationwide importance? What role, if any at all, should borough authorities play? Where does diminution of their powers leave local voters and Council Tax payers, whom local councillors are elected to serve?
Discuss. But in the meantime think about what’s coming next.
The summer’s stupidness about blow-in nimbys and stand-up pints has got no one any nearer to working out the best way forward or how to move in that direction. The Mayor’s collusion with it hasn’t helped. That said, it isn’t hard to imagine why he might be impatient when it comes to the West End.
When first elected Mayor, in May 2016, his manifesto pledged to “work with Westminster Council” and others “to pedestrianise Oxford Street”. For nearly two years that went pretty well. Westminster’s Tories of the time and Khan’s TfL made good, collaborative progress. The Elizabeth line – Crossrail as it was known back then – was on its way. There were hopes that the two projects would come to fruition in tandem. A transformed “nation’s high street” would form the spine of a reborn West End.
But just before the borough elections of May 2018, Westminster’s Conservatives got cold feet. The three-seat West End ward, which Oxford Street runs through, was feeling marginal, in part due to local people’s concerns about possible adverse effects on them of pedestrianisation. At a full council meeting in April it was announced that Westminster’s co-operation with City Hall had ended. And when Labour won control in 2022, it wasn’t revived.
Such was the backstory to Khan announcing, with very little notice, in September 2024, that he had the backing of the newly-elected Labour government to take Oxford Street’s future out of Westminster’s hands and into his own.
And now the landscape is shifting further. The Oxford Street Development Corporation is up and running, complete with planning powers over the area it covers. Complementing and in parallel with this, the Mayor’s draft new London Plan prepares the ground for him to pressure local authorities to, in the draft’s words, “take a positive approach to supporting growth in the night-time economy” in certain “clusters” with a stress on the Central Activities Zone, which includes the West End. Soho is given a gold star for having an “internationally significant night time economy”. Al fresco hospitality “is encouraged”.
And those new powers over licensing are on their way. The details, which will be crucial, have yet to emerge. David Kaner, chair of the Covent Garden Community Association’s licensing committee, has said on X/Twitter that the “over reaction” to Westminster’s licensing policies “is just the industry and Mayor lobbying MHCLG to get a wide definition for what is a Strategic Licence Application, so the Mayor can overturn decisions for most licenses in the West End.”
As he accumulates more power, might the Mayor be persuaded to strike a less combative note? Might doing so ultimately be more fruitful for both him and for the West End?
In June, senior figures from three West End business improvements districts and Tim Lord, appearing as a member of the Westminster Amenity Societies Forum, gave evidence to a London Assembly economy committee session about the economic impacts of the Oxford Street plan.
Some panellists said it wasn’t clear to them what the Mayor and the OSDC had in mind. Were they imagining Oxford Street being busier or calmer? What sort of mix of uses would be aimed for? Would the Mayor and the OSDC be receptive to their hopes and concerns about the scheme? Would the approach be productively holistic or disruptively piecemeal?
One of the BID representatives voiced the hope that the OSDC’s work would be a global exemplar of good place-making, benefiting all of the West End. A starting point for such success would be seeing the area in the round, as a rich and varying weave of office, creative, cultural, residential and hospitality that contains certain frictions but forms the fabric of the place. The goal should be to strengthen and enhance it. Unraveling it would be unwise.
There’s a legitimate debate to be had about licensing. Westminster Labour, for example, thinks the Tories’ broad preference for earlier closing times too restrictive and has proposed creating “night time opportunity areas” on the Strand, Oxford Street and Victoria Street, where relatively few people live. These were included in its “after dark” strategy, published before the party lost power. But they too have been mindful of what matters to the people of Soho and other West End residential niches.
Everyone is on high alert about the Mayor’s ambitions, and that is reasonable – “transformative” is not a neutral term. But, as I’ve learned in the course of compiling this piece, although some residents can be distressed by late night noise – which can be made by clean-up and delivery services as well as shouty human beings – others enjoy the energy and buzz, or consider its drawbacks worth enduring for the pleasures of living in such a special place. “It might be dirty, noisy and difficult on one level,” says Barbara Brownlee of Soho Housing, “but people adore living here. You can have a coffee and be sure of bumping into someone you know.”
Soho is itself a place of contrasts: little Great Pulteney Street, with its offices and gallery is quiet; Greek Street is jumping at weekends after dark. The point is made that licensing is a very local matter. In Soho, many homes are above restaurants or bars, or the width of a narrow street from them. Competing wishes – for lively socialising on the one hand, for sleep and quiet on the other – have to be justly and creatively refereed.
A venue paying for double, even triple, glazing can help. So can diligent venue management and enforcement of licensing conditions. And, yes, visible street policing can too. New ventures, done right and with commitment to the area, are welcomed – the tradition for live music is prized – just as popular ones that close are missed. The problems caused by pandemic al fresco might have been exceptional because so were the confinements of the pandemic. Done on a small scale, in the right streets, perhaps there could be more of it. Care and moderation can pay dividends.
In any case, claims that the West End’s hospitality sector has been in free fall appear inflated. Westminster gathers data from areas it calls cumulative impact zones to assess the effects of licensed premises on their immediate surroundings, on public safety and “community wellbeing”.
The zone that covers Soho, Piccadilly, Haymarket and Leicester Square has a higher concentration of licensed premises than anywhere else in the UK. The latest annual Cumulative Impacts Assessment report, published in June, says that between 2022 and 2023/24 there was a small reduction in the total number of licensed premises of all kinds there, from 968 to 947.
It is a loss that could have resulted from a range of factors, including the soaring cost of living and rising rents. The sector makes known its disquiet about hikes in national insurance and the minimum wage, but discretion may be the better part of valour when it comes to complaining about what their landlords charge them. That’s worth bearing in bind when popular venues close. Licensing policy might not be the culprit at all.
The Soho Society says that Soho itself (which in the society’s book includes Chinatown) accommodates over 500 licensed premises and that in 2025, an additional 15 were granted to establishments in the area. It adds that, in all, 122 licensed premises in Soho are allowed to operate until 6am. That might be an eye-opener for night owls and pundits who contend that Soho closes for business at 10pm.
The summer flood of “vertical drinking” nonsense has had one tangential compensation: Trump’s idiotic claim that Khan is overseeing London converting to sharia law looks even more pathetic now that the Muslim Mayor, who never touches alcohol, wants more opportunities for others to consume it. Otherwise, it has been a tedious waste of space at exactly the time when a serious and imaginative debate about the West End is needed.
Local politicians and other interested parties aren’t all on the same page about all the issues raised. But plenty of them believe that a winning West End combination means more full-time residents, not fewer. The argument is that they help to anchor the place, provide social capital and add essential “eyes on the street“. So do well-run local businesses, of whatever kind.
Some would like to see restrictions on Air BnB tightened and the use of innovative housing policies to meet the needs of the young on middling incomes as well as the low paid, helping to bring families back and save schools on the brink of extinction. “Unless it works for residents, people with kids and for older people, the centre of your city is a hollow, horrible place,” says Barbara Brownlee.
Nightmare scenarios are sketched about Oxford Street’s pedestrianisation leading the way to Soho and other West End neighbourhoods becoming a deregulated, soulless, unmanageable, 24-hour party zone that overshadows the West End’s other attractions and puts off more people than it attracts.
And of course, hospitality, entertainment and culture are only some of the factors in the complex West End equation. The local property sector is adjusting to the new circumstances too. Its input will be vital to creating a West End that works in all the right ways, as not every pedestrianisation project in other cities has. Planning policy needs to marshal the right tools to bring about the best outcomes.
The West End, with all its many moving parts, deserves a far higher standard of debate than it has been subjected to lately. The sooner one begins, the better.
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