Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith Walkowitz is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the author ofCity of Dreadful Delight. She lives in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

NIGHTS OUT

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................viiiAcknowledgments...............................xiiIntroduction..................................11 Cosmopolitan Soho...........................172 Battle of the Empire........................443 The "Vision of Salome"......................644 The Italian Restaurant......................925 Schleppers and Shoppers.....................1446 A Jewish Night Out..........................1827 The Shady Nightclub.........................2098 Windmill Theatre............................253Epilogue......................................286Abbreviations.................................304Notes.........................................305Selected Bibliography.........................377Index.........................................402

Chapter One

An early modern parish map of St. Anne, Soho appears on the front of a postcard circulated by the Soho Society, a local amenities group organized in 1972 (Plate 1). Joe's Basement, a premier photographic shop on Wardour Street, Soho, produced the map in appealing green colors, suggestive of the pastoral origins of sixteenth-century Soho as open space and hunting ground between Westminster and the City of London. The caption of the postcard reads: "First published c.1690, this map shows the original pattern of Soho streets, still easily recognizable today."

The Soho Society reproduced this artifact to defend the integrity of Soho's urban gridwork against the rapacious designs of late twentieth-century property speculators and municipal planners. The early-modern engraving also carried its own political design: its intention was to delineate the (1686) parish boundaries of St. Anne, Soho, and to mark its interior territory as readable, knowable, and clearly bounded. St. Anne appears as a manorial village, with parish church (designed by Wren's office), market, aristocratic residences, squares, and orderly streets. In this drawing, St. Anne stands alone, disconnected from the rest of London. Carved out of four aristocratic estates, the new parish was surrounded by ancient highways. To the north is Tyburn Road, the traditional name of Oxford Street, before it became a world-famous shopping street. Hog Lane, the top part of what is now Charing Cross Road, sets the eastern limits, while Wardour Street, a straight north-south line, forms the seventeenth-century western frontier of Soho. No sharp line delineates the southern boundary of the parish, which encompassed Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) and what the Survey of London (1966) describes as the "higgledy-piggledy" development in the southeastern corner around Newport Market.

In the seventeenth century, Soho was a fashionable but mixed neighborhood, home to aristocratic fashion, foreign ambassadors, and Huguenot Protestant artisans who were fleeing religious persecution in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). The map conveys very little of Soho's diverse social character: its two-dimensional ground plan obscures most of the private property and social distinctions in the parish, but highlights the legal and administrative orders that preside over them. Only the public institutions—the great houses and the church—are noted by name and signaled with little house ideograms. In contrast, the map reduces private houses, with all their variegated shapes and sizes, to defined rectangular blocks along the street grid. In these structures resided artists, artisans, and aristocrats. One may, nonetheless, detect some social differentiation in the numbered alleys and courts that thread their way through the larger streets; these entities are keyed to a list located on the top right of the engraving. As evidence of a foreign presence, virtually coincident with the parish's foundations, the "French Church" on Hog Lane appears as no. 14 on this list.

Soho's seventeenth-century street patterns would persist into the twenty-first century, but Soho's geographic and social identity has always been more mobile, fluid, and contested than this orderly engraving or subsequent mappings of Soho would suggest. Soho's "recognizable" boundaries have, in fact, been historically mutable, the result of changing and overlapping jurisdictions of governmental and philanthropic institutions, as well as new roadways and commercial development. They have also shifted in relation to changing social usages and informal annexations of contiguous spaces by Sohoites.

Material and imaginative forces converged to shape Soho as a cosmopolitan space in late Victorian and Edwardian London. This chapter first assesses the changing built environment and social geography of Soho and its West End peripheries in the nineteenth century. Then it turns its attention to the new mental mappings of cosmopolitan Soho by a series of key social actors, texts, and media events between 1894 and 1914. At the turn of the century, social surveys, fiction, and popular journalism figured Soho as a plague spot of international crime, subversive politics, and illicit sex, while also charting its new status as an attractive stage set for bodily pleasures, appetites, and modern technologies of the self. A new genre of Victorian local history was especially crucial to Soho's enhanced cachet. Soho reformers and ethnic entrepreneurs exploited books on Soho and its historical associations to advance contemporary Soho's reputation as the repository of memories of Old London and as a benign site of sophisticated, cosmopolitan pleasures.

Urban Cosmopolitanism and New London

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a central district devoted to cosmopolitan consumption was assembled along the street improvements of Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road and the older environs of Oxford Street and Leicester Square. These West End boulevards cemented Soho's modern identity, but they also opened up the district for commercial and industrial exploitation. Nineteenth-century thoroughfares ripped through the central rookeries of Old London, displacing thousands of residents from the noisome slums that resisted police supervision. Simultaneously, they transported new social actors into the district, including legions of service and theatrical workers who assisted and entertained suburbanites and tourists descending on the West End to visit the shops and the shows. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the electrified underground railways disgorged thousands of travelers along the entire circumference of Soho, at stations located at Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Tottenham Court Road, and Leicester Square.

The rebuilding of Soho's peripheries began with the Regent Street project of the 1820s, a large canyon, 120 feet wide and two miles in length, fronted by palatial, six-story shops and residences. Built on Crown lands, Regent Street was the centerpiece of John Nash's renovation of the "court end" of London, providing a parade ground and shopping street for a fashionable neighborhood. The new street also connected the royal green space of Regent's Park at its northern end to the Prince Regent's palace at Carleton House in the south. It supplied a main sewer pipe under the surface and badly needed access for north-south traffic through central London. Its sham-stuccoed facades and window displays of "female fripperies" immediately gave it a Parisian impression. Regent Street...