were once filled with artists now contain Britain’s
highest concentration of advertising agencies; real artists displaced by the counterfeit, the second rate; creative individuals
prostituting their talent.
Not surprisingly then, it was to Soho that people came to get away from Britain for a few hours. It was in Soho that British
jazz and British rock ’n’ roll found their beginnings in dozens of late-night clubs; it was in the Soho pubs, like the French,
which even today does not possess a pint mug, where bohemia thrived and painters and boxers and students and prostitutes mingled;
it was where the bookshops were, and the cheap Greek and Italian cafés, and the drinking clubs, and spielers and brothels,
and where even a few art galleries tentatively opened their doors on to bomb-shattered streets.
When I first was first taken to the French pub in the early sixties, I feltimmediately at home. In the Cotswolds I had always felt a complete outsider in the pubs with their horse brasses and red-faced
gentlemen farmers in cavalry twills and chukka boots. At the French, in contrast, the faces of the clientele were deathly
pale, they wore shades and looked like artistic gangsters. They were drinking wine and pastis and there was not one mention
of agriculture. It was wonderful.
This book is set largely in the West End; it is there that the magnet which draws people into London is located. The bohemia
of Fitzrovia and Soho during the war years drew in the next generation: poets like Michael Horovitz graduated from Oxford
and moved straight to small flats in Soho. The beatniks of the early sixties congregated around Goodge Street in Fitzrovia,
giving the One Tun as their mailing address, thereby making it the destination of the next wave hitch-hiking in from Newcastle
and Glasgow. The underground scene of London in the sixties was perceived as a West End phenomenon: that was where the U F
O Club, Middle Earth, Indica Books, the
IT
offices, the Arts Lab and other centres of activity were located, but by then most of the contact addresses scribbled on
grubby bits of paper would have had w10 or w11 postcodes because that was where the cheap housing was.
Only in the nineties did the focus shift further east to e1 and e2, as artists colonized the grim industrial wastelands and
tower blocks of the East End proper. Writers such as Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Wright have staked
a claim to the East End as a dynamo of cultural ferment, crossed by ley-lines, studded with vertical time pits connecting
the present with the eighteenth century, inhabited by eccentrics and bohemians. Sinclair’s psychogeographical wanderings are
especially valuable in making this disparate part of London coherent. But there was pitifully little there in the eighteenth
century except market gardens and meadows. It was, and remains, suburban. They have made the best of a landscape of flooded
air-raid shelters, the floorplans of long-gone Nissen and American Quonset huts and post-war emergency prefabs; vistas enlivened
by the occasional remaining detail on a graffiti-covered Victorian town hall or an unusual allotment hut. They even have a
Hawksmoor church or two, but until recently this was not the London that pulls people halfway across the world.
The London of dreams is Swinging London: the King’s Road of rainbow-crested punks and Austin Powers; tourists on the zebra
crossing at Abbey Road; Big Ben and the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. It is more specifically the West End, which has
been the cosmopolitan centre of London for 300 years: the impeccably dressed old man slumped in the back of a shining chauffeur-driver
Rolls-Royce powering up Hill Street in Mayfair at 3 a.m.;drunks trying to find their way out of Leicester Square; it is the late-night drinkers emerging from Gerry’s on Dean Street,
blinking in the sunlight as people push past them on their way to work. It
highest concentration of advertising agencies; real artists displaced by the counterfeit, the second rate; creative individuals
prostituting their talent.
Not surprisingly then, it was to Soho that people came to get away from Britain for a few hours. It was in Soho that British
jazz and British rock ’n’ roll found their beginnings in dozens of late-night clubs; it was in the Soho pubs, like the French,
which even today does not possess a pint mug, where bohemia thrived and painters and boxers and students and prostitutes mingled;
it was where the bookshops were, and the cheap Greek and Italian cafés, and the drinking clubs, and spielers and brothels,
and where even a few art galleries tentatively opened their doors on to bomb-shattered streets.
When I first was first taken to the French pub in the early sixties, I feltimmediately at home. In the Cotswolds I had always felt a complete outsider in the pubs with their horse brasses and red-faced
gentlemen farmers in cavalry twills and chukka boots. At the French, in contrast, the faces of the clientele were deathly
pale, they wore shades and looked like artistic gangsters. They were drinking wine and pastis and there was not one mention
of agriculture. It was wonderful.
This book is set largely in the West End; it is there that the magnet which draws people into London is located. The bohemia
of Fitzrovia and Soho during the war years drew in the next generation: poets like Michael Horovitz graduated from Oxford
and moved straight to small flats in Soho. The beatniks of the early sixties congregated around Goodge Street in Fitzrovia,
giving the One Tun as their mailing address, thereby making it the destination of the next wave hitch-hiking in from Newcastle
and Glasgow. The underground scene of London in the sixties was perceived as a West End phenomenon: that was where the U F
O Club, Middle Earth, Indica Books, the
IT
offices, the Arts Lab and other centres of activity were located, but by then most of the contact addresses scribbled on
grubby bits of paper would have had w10 or w11 postcodes because that was where the cheap housing was.
Only in the nineties did the focus shift further east to e1 and e2, as artists colonized the grim industrial wastelands and
tower blocks of the East End proper. Writers such as Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Wright have staked
a claim to the East End as a dynamo of cultural ferment, crossed by ley-lines, studded with vertical time pits connecting
the present with the eighteenth century, inhabited by eccentrics and bohemians. Sinclair’s psychogeographical wanderings are
especially valuable in making this disparate part of London coherent. But there was pitifully little there in the eighteenth
century except market gardens and meadows. It was, and remains, suburban. They have made the best of a landscape of flooded
air-raid shelters, the floorplans of long-gone Nissen and American Quonset huts and post-war emergency prefabs; vistas enlivened
by the occasional remaining detail on a graffiti-covered Victorian town hall or an unusual allotment hut. They even have a
Hawksmoor church or two, but until recently this was not the London that pulls people halfway across the world.
The London of dreams is Swinging London: the King’s Road of rainbow-crested punks and Austin Powers; tourists on the zebra
crossing at Abbey Road; Big Ben and the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. It is more specifically the West End, which has
been the cosmopolitan centre of London for 300 years: the impeccably dressed old man slumped in the back of a shining chauffeur-driver
Rolls-Royce powering up Hill Street in Mayfair at 3 a.m.;drunks trying to find their way out of Leicester Square; it is the late-night drinkers emerging from Gerry’s on Dean Street,
blinking in the sunlight as people push past them on their way to work. It
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