Boho Soho

Soho is the area of the West End bound by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. With its chic but anodyne bars and restaurants it’s largely indistiguishable from any other part of town, but during a 20 year period after WWII a small part of this area was the centre of bohemian life, a refuge from the grey uniformity of London. The overt sleazyness that Soho became synonymous with during the 70s and 80s had not yet taken hold, the excesses and outrage being perpetrated instead by artists and intellectuals in the pubs and clubs, fuelled by alarming amounts of red wine, vodka and gin.

Walking up Charing Cross Road from Cambridge Circus you’ll pass St Martin’s School Of Art on the left, from which students such as the painter Frank Auerbach would frequently slip round the corner into this world of hedonism, turning the corner at Foyle’s, down Manette Street and through the archway onto Greek Street. Here you’ll find one of London’s oldest pubs, The Pillars Of Hercules, and as with any local watering hole it was once frequented by the painter Francis Bacon. Turning right out of the pub and up towards Soho Square you’ll see the Gay Hussar restaurant on the right hand side, haunt of left-wing backbenchers and journalists, and famously the place where the outrageous and homosexual Labour politician Tom Driberg goosed Mick Jagger and attempted to persuade him to become a Labour MP. Driberg was a regular member of the audience at Peter Cook’s satirical comedy club The Establishment, also located on Greek Street for a couple of years in the early 60s. Resplendent in pink, unconvential, irreverent and awash with alcohol, it was perfectly located in the heart of Soho.

At the bottom of Greek Street you’ll find the Coach and Horses, once run by the self styled “rudest landlord in London” Norman Balon, and immortalised in the West End play “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell”, a brilliant catalogue of anecdotes based on life in Soho and particularly that of the colourful drunkard, gambler and writer Jeffrey Bernard, of whom there are still cartoons hanging on the walls. Turning right into Romilly Street you’ll pass the Edwardian elegance of Kettner’s on the right, then after turning right into Frith Street you’ll be in the midst of Old Compton Street. In the 50s it was littered with shops such as Parmigianis, King Bomba and Roches selling exotic European groceries, but now only the fabulous-smelling Camisa remains. It was also punctuated by establishments such as the Swiss Pub at number 53 (now Compton’s) and Wheeler’s Fish Restaurant at number 19 (now the Boheme Kitchen And Bar) where Francis Bacon would hold court and buy champagne for any number of painters, writers, musicians, and even East End gangsters.

After lunch the action would invariably move to one of the clubs that were such an integral part of bohemian Soho life. Pubs were at that time obliged to shut between 3pm and 5.30pm, and places such as Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room at 41 Dean Street became the focal point. Artists such as Nina Hamnett, Lucian Freud and Robert Colquhoun, composers such as Malcolm Arnold and Alan Rawsthorne, poets such as Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice would be greeted by Muriel’s “hello, cunty”, and slowly work towards the most biblical of hangovers. Granted, David Bowie once managed to survive ejection from the Colony after daring to request a cup of tea, but generally drunkenness and bad behaviour ruled supreme. Dylan Thomas described his visits to Soho as “a horrid alcoholic explosion that scatters all my good intentions over the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs in London.”

One of these pubs would have been the York Minster, in which Thomas once lost a manuscript of “Under Milk Wood” during one a marathon drinking session. It’s a few doors down from the Colony and now known as the French House, after its association with Charles De Gaulle and the Free French resistance movement. Almost next door is the Golden Lion, where one could and frequently would pick up rent-boys without even trying, and all this went on under the nose of the far more upmarket and trendier Groucho Club at number 45.

Off Dean Street and onto sleepy Meard Street were two more exclusive Soho clubs – The Mandrake and The Gargoyle – but now we’re into the slightly calmer end of Soho, with the fruit and veg markets of Berwick & Rupert Street and the old delicatessens of Brewer Street, now mostly replaced by strip joints and peep shows. The last outpost of Soho is at Piccadilly Circus, where at the Café Royal it was always possible to drink until 1am provided you also purchased a meal. Fortunately a ham sandwich was legally classed as a meal, and the practice of ordering one from a waiter would invariably be replied with “do you want that for eating, sir?”

Today it’s hard to imagine a Soho of men in hats and macintoshes, gangsters, tarts, drunken artists, poets, petty criminals, sailors and very little money, but these were the ingredients that made it, for a time, easily the most colourful place in London.

London’s pedestrian bridges

From Battersea Power Station to the The Tower of London, there are 15 bridges spanning the River Thames. Some of the capital’s finest views are to be seen while strolling across them, and the three most recently planned river crossings are all for the benefit of pedestrians while our vehicle driving brothers are left to stew in queues of traffic at Vauxhall Cross or Borough High Street.

The much maligned Millennium Bridge opened in the summer of 2000 as the first dedicated pedestrian bridge across the Thames, and shut again almost immediately as the public were blamed by the architects for walking in step with each other and causing the bridge to sway disconcertingly from side to side. 18 months and £5m of repairs later, it carries flocks of tourists from St Pauls to the new London attractions of the Tate Modern and The Globe Theatre. It’s a sleek and slinky spectacle; nicknamed “The Blade Of Light” because of its fibre-optic enhanced sci-fi appearance at night, its only downside appears to be the alarming translucence of the walkway, causing teenage boys to idly linger underneath the southern end of the bridge and casually wait for skirt-wearing girls to walk across.

The recently completed pedestrian crossing at the Hungerford Railway Bridge connects Charing Cross and the West End with the South Bank complex. Anyone who made the trip in recent years will recall gingerly making their way down a series of planks attached by rusty bolts to a rusty iron frame, surely the most hideous of the Thames’s crossing points. The new structure seems to have been constructed with the purpose of completely obliterating the sight of that delapidated railway bridge, which it does very successfully. It’s beautifully and sensitively lit at night in a way IKEA would be proud of, and the white pylons do indeed make it a “new landmark for London”, complimenting the nearby London Eye beautifully.

Work is due to start soon on The Jubilee Bridge, which will similarly distract attention from the rather nasty Alexandra Bridge which carries trains south out of Cannon Street Station. It’ll be the only covered bridge across The Thames, a futuristic tube-like structure running alongside the existing railway. On the face of it there is none of the obvious functionality of its two sisters further upstream, with no major tourist attractions either north or south of the bridge (although the planned expansion of Borough Market at Bankside will no doubt prove to be a draw) and would seem to mainly be a boon for the lazy city worker; not only are Southwark and London Bridges just a mere 2 minute walk away, but, should they choose to use the new crossing, lifts are planned to gently transport them up to bridge level.

Sunday In The City

The financial centre of London known as The Square Mile is also its oldest part. The Roman town of Londinium was founded in AD50 and the initial settlements were just east of what is now Bank tube station. It’s an area rich in history, but any attempts to explore it during the week will be hampered by people in suits barking into mobile phones and rushing around frantically. However, should you visit on a Sunday you can treat yourself to some exquisitely peaceful strolling, with barely a person in sight and eerily empty roads.

It’s a delight for the flitting tourist, as there is an immense amount to see but as many things are shut, little to explore in depth. St Paul’s Cathedral is open for services but not for sightseeing, so the adjoining Festival Gardens are virtually empty. From the cathedral, signposts will lure you through tiny side streets to such improbably named attractions as the ruins of the Temple Of Mithras, the church of St James Garlickhythe, and Dr Johnson’s House. There is no area of London so keen on informing you what is around the next corner, what used to be situated in a particular place, who donated trees, who gave the right of way under an archway. It’s all documented on hundreds of plaques, boards and signs, and with no distractions or noise it’s easy to immerse yourself in history.

Visitors to London are generally staggered by the variety of architecture in the space of a few yards, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the City. The green and maroon of the deserted Leadenhall Market makes a strange neighbour to the grim pipework of the imposing Lloyd’s Building. The area’s 30-odd churches can slip by almost unnoticed, for instance the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre around the back of the Central Criminal Courts on Old Bailey.

You should bring a packed lunch with you, as 99% of the bars and cafes have chairs firmly on tables until Monday morning. But you’ll be spoilt for beautiful settings to eat it: Finsbury Circus, the Barber Surgeon’s Herb Garden at London Wall, Postman’s Park off St Martin’s Le Grand, the Rose Garden at Christchurch Greyfriars and dozens more that you’ll happen upon by accident.

Should you wish to escape the solitude of your Sunday stroll, it’s easy to do so. Nip over the Millenium Bridge to the Tate Modern. Wander through Aldgate to the colour & noise of the markets on Brick Lane & Petticoat Lane, or south to the Tower Of London. Explore the high walks of the Barbican and Moorgate en route to the chic bars of Hoxton. But for relaxation, space, and time to yourself, a Sunday in the Square Mile can’t be beat.