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  • Soho Magic
  • Jerry White (bio)
Judith R. Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012, 414 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-15194-7

Soho – magic syllables! For when the respectable Londoner wants to feel devilish he goes to Soho, where every street is a song. He walks through Old Compton Street, and, instinctively, he swaggers; he is abroad; he is a dog.

Thomas Burke, Nights in Town: a London Autobiography, 1915, p. 253. [End Page 281] Thomas Burke wrote this paean to Soho at the beginning of the First World War. Then, and for a long time before, Soho had been a corner of a foreign field that remained for ever French. As Judith R. Walkowitz’s exemplary study shows, it would not remain so for very much longer.

The French had made Soho cosmopolitan from its very beginnings, a hundred-and-fifty years or so before the word entered the language. The main streets that make up those portions of the parishes of St James, north of Piccadilly, and St Anne, Soho – the two parishes properly comprising Walkowitz’s ‘Soho’ – were generally laid out in the 1670s and ’80s as part of the westward surge of suburban building that followed the Great Fire. These years coincided with the migrations of French Protestant refugees to London, and the new suburban housing coming on the rental market offered to the most prosperous of the Huguenot artisans working in gold and silver the chance to establish their homes and workshops there. By 1711 it is thought that some two out of five Soho residents were French. From the very start, the institutions of this little corner of Westminster had a foreign feel in its churches, eateries, workshops, provision-dealers, bookshops and so on.

French migrations to Soho never stopped. They were replenished by refugee Catholic priests, aristocrats and others from 1789, and again in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848; following the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1870 a more radical and proletarian refugee migration naturally turned to London’s French quarter for respite. Around and between, and right through to 1914, economic migration brought French and other European migrants – Germans, Swiss, Italians in particular – to work in London’s hotels and eating-houses, many now based in Soho itself and catering for both migrants and tourists from abroad as well as those sophisticated native Londoners who had sampled continental fare. By the second half of the nineteenth century the numbers of foreign-born were such that this western cosmopolis had burst the bounds of Soho, creating a predominantly German quarter north of Oxford Street in what some called North Soho and what others would come to call Fitzrovia. To the Metropolitan Police, Walkowitz tells us, this area was ‘Soho’ too.

As a consequence of its cosmopolitanism, Soho had long attracted to it a large part of London’s night life. Carlisle House in Soho Square had been famous for masquerades, gambling, music and expensive prostitution from the 1760s, its impresario Italian and its musical performers German. And Leicester Square and the streets around had by the 1790s become the premier metropolitan entertainment district, boasting several exhibition and concert halls; a hundred years later it was also home to London’s main variety theatres.

By the 1890s no other part of London combined this long-established cosmopolitanism with the conspicuous consumption of metropolitan night-time pleasures. The combination proved protean in Soho’s restless capacity to reinvent itself as the Londoners’ playground. This unique [End Page 282] contribution is indeed hard to exaggerate in the modern story of London. And now Judith R. Walkowitz offers a new and invigorating history of this ‘potent incubator of metropolitan change’ and its multiple meanings for the metropolis in the first half of the twentieth century. She traces its quick-change adaptability through ‘the commercial economies of dancing, food, music, fashion, and sex’.

The greatest of these was dancing. Of all her Soho ‘economies’, this receives the most comprehensive treatment. Dance is the book’s supple backbone. For dance and dance-music in Soho were truly transnational: the French can-can, Latin-American tango, Afro-American jazz all...

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