The doors are open (again) in the small Colony Room Club, the meeting place for Soho’s most boozy residents for 60 years. Same hours of 3pm to 11pm, same swamp green walls, same slightly wonky salon hanging of artwork. What’s missing is the ghostly cast of regulars – artists, writers and drinkers, many of whom are long gone – and the formidable original landlady, Muriel Belcher, who died in 1979.
Oh, and it won’t be at 41 Dean Street. This version of the famous bar, Colony Room Green, is located in Heddon Street, Mayfair (below the Bowie-themed restaurant Ziggy Green from the Daisy Green Collection) and opens today. At the helm of the subterranean Colony Room 2.1 (or 2.2, as this is the second revival) is artist, author and former member Darren Coffield, who owns much of the memorabilia.
Soho, on the other hand, has just opened The Broadwick, a 57-room hotel on the corner of Broadwick Street and Berwick Street, with its name in lights above the door and two giant elephants out front in leopard skin and top hats, which they can easily hold. their own against the rickshaws that pulse past like crazed jellyfish.
The new hotel overlooks the glass-fronted dim sum tent Yauatcha. They dwarf their older neighbors: the Blue Posts pub, Berwick Street and its market, vinyl sellers Universal Sounds and Reckless Records, and the corner newsagent with its red and white striped awning.
Cue moaning about Soho losing its mojo. “Oh, not again,” said Simon Buckley, the rector of St Anne’s Soho, as he showed me photographs of the church, which was destroyed in 1940 to be replaced by the current chapel and community centre. “Soho changes with every generation. It was a refuge for the Huguenots, then came craftsmen and craftsmen, then Jewish tailors and the rag trade, the music, film and advertising industries, then the sex trade, followed by the LGBTQ community. Now it seems to be all about food and drink.”
I do have some skin in the game. I came to Soho the year Muriel Belcher died. My first job was at a film company in Wardour Street (gone); my lady boss was known to dance on the tables (away) during lunch at the Gay Hussar; I saw my first hand-shot porn on a Moviola (road); and as a journalist I have wasted many a nice evening in the Groucho and Bar Italia (both still here) or in Blacks (just gone).
In other words, and like most people, I’ve never seen Francis Bacon slumped at the bar or hooked up with Tracey Emin – they’re all borrowed memories, just like the jazz clubs of the 1920s and the skiffle bars of the 1920s. fifty. While I really miss the ugliness, when I look at photos from the early 1980s I’m quite shocked that I wasn’t bothered by how sloppy or how sexist it was. And yes, I miss the chaotic jumble of businesses and people, the colorful world that existed when property was cheap, but London just doesn’t work that way anymore, whether you’re in Soho or Dalston, Clapham or Camden Town.
I’m still happy with Soho. It’s a beautiful part of London, the other Square Mile; a dense grid of streets in the shape of an axe-head, bounded by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Tottenham Court Road, which merges to the south into busy Chinatown, with two squares and several churches.
There’s a surprising amount of the old stuff. Who couldn’t love Meard Street, a strip of early Georgian houses still standing after 300 years, like carefully maintained teeth? A friend just sent a link to last week’s thebluemoment blog on this topic, written by music writer Richard Williams. Who couldn’t love that Ronnie Scott’s is not only there, but thriving – as you’ll know if you’ve tried to book recently – or that the Algerian Coffee Stores (1887) and the Italian delicatessen I Camisa still exist. in Old Compton Street?
But the point now, and what saves Soho, despite the chains and the slightly creepy management of the space, is that it still works. The major production and post-production houses, De Lane Lea, Molinare and MPC, are still there, as are many design and advertising companies. Behind the digital screens of Piccadilly Circus, a seven-storey office complex, Lumen, has opened to keep the crowds going.
Many small spaces are home to independent businesses, from food to fashion. Great old acquaintances such as Andrew Edmunds on Lexington Street, whose eponymous owner sadly passed away in 2022, have been joined by a dizzying variety of food, much of it Asian, often in venues so small they don’t accept bookings.
The 21st century saw the venerable Soho Theater Company occupy a new concrete house on Wardour Street, the arrival of two hugely popular Firmdale hotels – Ham Yard, named after the Ham Bone Club of the 1920s, and the Soho Hotel, with its gigantic bar – and a revitalized Carnaby Street, as unashamedly commercial as it was when it sold loons and kipper ties in the 1960s and much loved for its Christmas lights. There is a great little French biodynamic wine bar, Antidote, just off the main road.
Meanwhile, the Elizabeth Line’s purple roundel has emerged at the top of Dean Street, marking one of two new entrances to Tottenham Court Road tube station. Several old favorites were razed to the ground in the process, but opposite the other entrance, with its strangely mesmerizing giant cube of digital images, stands Soho’s first new theater in 50 years: Nimax’s 600-seat @SohoPlace, helmed by producer Nica Burns.
The place I always go is Bar Bruno on Wardour Street, an Italian café that has remained virtually unchanged in 40 years. The place I’d like to stay is also old: Hazlitt’s, a lovely thirty-room hotel in a 1718 house on Frith Street, where the essayist of that name once lived.
Douglas Blain, one of the founders, was also a key player in the rescue of Spitalfields.
“Atmosphere is the easiest thing to destroy and the hardest thing to create,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not about money. It’s about the soul.” Take note, Soho developers. We are keeping a close eye on it.