How Soho went from rough and ready to sleek and sterile

Last week I strolled over to Berwick Street for a coffee and a morning gossip with Robin Neal Smith. The owner of the Soho Dairy stall, he has been making a name for himself as the activist-defender of the old Berwick Street Market traditions.

It was once a rough-and-ready fruit and veg market that served the restaurants in Soho, as well as the locals. But over the decades the market shrunk and changed. Now it is mostly food stands in the afternoon with a queue of office workers outside. Old fashioned trading is over, observes Neal Smith, as he tips the foam on to the flat white.

I’m quite used to hearing grumbling from long term Soho locals — “it isn’t like it used to be”, they say of the square mile of pokey old buildings and narrow streets in central London. Nor would you want it to be, I think: fifty years ago it was full of pimps and drug dealers.

But on one point I hear Neal Smith out. Something is afoot on the streets, in the frontages, and the new alfresco dining of Soho — the place itself feels less like a place to do business, more and more like a sleek showroom of both wares and style.

You can see it through shop windows: the increasingly stark displays of their goods.

This isn’t unusual in those luxury shop clusters in nearby Bond Street or Paris’s Rue Saint Honore, or Rome’s Via dei Condotti, where every item costs a fortune. But in Soho, London’s playground?

On the walk to the coffee stand is Axel Arigato, a Swedish brand which sells sneakers. So refined are these objects, so perfectly spaced from each other, you half expect them to be in glass cases.

Luxury brand JW Anderson has a flagship store on Brewer Street, incongruous and glowing white between an arcade and a legendary gay bar. And Alex Eagle runs an emporium of clothes and lifestyle items on Lexington Street that is so exquisite you think you are walking into a magazine shoot.

Many people may well aspire to this, but living it day to day is something rather different, especially for residents of the district. Most flats here aren’t the luxury sort — they are just “nice”.

Meanwhile, the boutiques keep arriving. Jack Wills founder Peter Williams departed the preppy clothing company three years ago, and is restarting the original brand Aubin in the Carnaby Quarter in September. To the casual stroller, I’m sure it will look artisanal but it is being backed by high street retailer Next whose logistics systems it will use.

The retail giants on Oxford Street and Regent Street are going through the agonies in a digital-first 21st century. Two historic department stores, BHS and Debenhams, became extinct. Others prepare for a shift in strategy. Big retail is gaming how to turn its high street stores into experience spaces.

But it appears to have arrived in Soho already and by stealth.

So refined are these sneakers, so perfectly spaced from each other, you half expect them to be in glass cases

On the surface, it shouldn’t happen. Small shops don’t have grand strategies. This place has always been rather more ad hoc. For the last century it has just been buy-and-sell, from coffee and clothes, sex, tailoring, fruit and veg, vinyl, dinner: whatever the customer wants, whoever can squeeze in to sell it.

But it has. There has been a long running mission to transform the streets around this central quarter by both the council and the large landowners, to shepherd it away from being a messy square mile of pubs and record shops and towards one of pretty Instagrammable scenes of the area. Their rewards: higher rents, higher business rates.

The alfresco dining scene that came about through need during the Covid pandemic already made Soho feel less like a place to booze, more to dine out like a European. (Some residents hate it, I rather love it).

Local landowners like Shaftesbury carefully curate who trades in their areas around Carnaby Street and, by dint of the rents, who lives there. They create experience spaces as much as high streets, and come Christmas, take great delight in all the Instagrams people take of their street decorations.

Westminster Council recently launched a Vision for Soho consultation, peppered buzzwords like “socially sustainable future” which, I’m fairly sure, will try to “better” Soho in this direction.

These showroom shops would have been far too refined for the old hustle-and-bustle era. For this new era they might fit right into the new vision. They also seem to thrive on their insouciance for customers.

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You begin to suspect they are paid from a marketing budget rather than real trade, with success being the click click of a photo rather than the ching ching of tills.

The obvious wail of locals, not in need of designer sunglasses, is “where do I go and buy a mop and bucket?” Once that was a valid complaint. But with the advent of Amazon Prime and other delivery services, it is not so obviously a disaster.

The greater problem may be that the immediacy of inner city life gives way to a rather more still, almost narcissistic experience. I walked back past the perfectly polished windows of Axel Arigato, seeing my own reflection in the windows. All the acres of clean white space behind the glass leaves one feeling rather empty.

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Letters in response to this column:

Soho’s retail chic irks one longtime resident / From Andy Mackay, London W1, UK

Soho’s ‘junkspace’ jogs memories of happier times / From Kanad Chakrabarti, New York, NY, US