Last Days of Soho
November 14, 2024 at 02:46AMWhat does the future look like for Soho, a district at the very heart of London? Francisco Garcia talks with “a wide selection of Soho residents, past and present, a diverse constituency of council and private tenants and middle-class, occasionally very wealthy homeowners, young, old and middle-aged” to find where views diverge and align. The result is a fascinating insight into a diverse area where partiers, tourists, and residents merge.
I’d become interested in this increasingly bitter debate around Soho’s future at the start of the year. Having long covered all manner of complicated squabbles across the capital, something in the story felt fresh. If the apparent three-way stand-off between ‘business’, local authority and residents was familiar, the prospect of reporting on it in this part of town was not. Like most Londoners, I have my own private Soho myth kitty, a 15-year-plus patchwork of nights on the tiles, after-work pints, weekend rambles and random, piecemeal weirdness to contend with. And, in trying to unpick the various claims and counterclaims regarding the enrichment or desecration of Soho, I realised that the concerns of the area’s small, centuries-old residential community had never really been factored into them.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/13/last-days-of-soho/
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