| Materie: | Appunti |
| Categoria: | Ricerche |
Voto: | 2.5 (2) |
| Download: | 105 |
| Data: | 17.04.2001 |
| Numero di pagine: | 2 |
| Formato di file: | .doc (Microsoft Word) |
Testo
Soho
From hunting round to boozing and cruising ground – Soho’s come a long way in not much over 3000 years. Sliced off from the rest of London by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, Soho is an island in the centre of the city – distinctive, proud, particular.
The integry of this unique district has undoubtedly benefited from its lack of “attractions”, in the conventional sense. The streets are narrow, the buildings mean;there are no museums or galleries, and precious little greenery – people, not things, are the sights of Soho. While older brother Covent Garden has sobered up and scrubbed itself down, the mantle of London’s pleasure zone has passed westward. Scruffier, dirtier and noiser, Soho is where media London works and where the rest ofLondon plays.
Most of the district was laid out in the 1670s and 1680s as part of a general expansion westward from the overcrowded City. Soho (the name derives from an old hunting call) was completed just in time to absorb an influx of Greek Christians fleeing Ottoman persecution, and a larger of French Protestans, forced out of Louis XIV’s bigotry. Many were talented craftmen and set up leather, silver forniture workshops. Thus, from the outset, Soho has acted as a sponge and haven for outcasts and misfits; a spirit of toleration was born out of necessary, and remains one of the area’s defining characteristics.
Those who didn’t like that they saw got out – most of the early well-to-do residents left their Soho Square mansions for the grander, more exclusive developments of Mayfair in the early eighteenth century – and in moved the artists, writers, radicals and yet more foreign immigrants (particularly Italians).
As the resident population dropped in the twentieth century, the area became increasingly known for its entertainments (legal and otherwise) and cheap resturants. Jazz came to Soho in the 1950s and the sex industry expanded rapidly in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, with operators and police in cahoots, Soho was in danger in being overrun by the sex trade. A major clampdown – which included the prosecution of several high-ranking police offices for bribery and corruption – saw the number of premises used by the sex trade drop by five-sixths in the 1980s. At the same time, Soho was regaining its dynamism, thanks largely to its increasingly visible and energetic gay scene. Pubs like the Golden Lion on Dean Street had long been the haunt of gay servicement, but now gay cafes, late-nihgt bars and clubs, and fetish shops appeared along Old Compton Street, injecting a much needed vitality and “joie de vivre” into the district.
That Soho is now more popular than ever is a cause for both celebration and concern. A 24-hour culture is developing, people are talking to the streets – eating, drinking, promenading: coming over all continental. Yet the chains are moving in too, bringing with them those fainthearts who previously found Soho too grimy and seedy for their tastes.
