Creativity of all kinds is flourishing amid what’s left of Lockdown in London.
On our walk today we were surprised to come across groups of people outside a nearby pub, swigging what appeared to be beer from plastic milk containers.
On investigation, I discovered this was not the isolated incident I had taken it to be but an actual movement, aimed at enabling fans of craft beers, only available on draft, to drink them at home. The containers – sometimes they can be collectors’ items in earthenware or pewter – are called “growlers” because the nineteenth – century punter would carry his or her beer home from the local pub in a small, galvanised bucket and the sound of gas escaping from the lid was said to sound like a growl. Apparently, there are quite a few London pubs where you can take your growler to be refilled and The States boasts actual filling stations in some grocery stores.
This normally rather gloomily dark restaurant on Dean St.It looks inviting and cheerful in its new incarnation and is at least managing to do some takeaway business and there was evidence of creativity at an open air birthday party yesterday afternoon in the park. This party was as festive as any with guests socially distanced on a rug with cake and candles, flowers in the trees and balloons on their Boris bikes.
Soho is awash with creative ways of getting custom back into the area . It’s going to be Hell for residents for at least three months if restaurateurs succeed in getting the area pedestrianised and licensed to serve food in the street. But we have to just grin and bear it. We live here because we love Soho’s vibrancy and buzz. No matter that the Bohemianism which drew us here has now mostly transmuted into bourgeoise comfort. It’s partly our fault so I reckon we have a responsibility to resuscitate what’s left.
We took another walk round Soho yesterday observing increasing signs of optimism. The sadly boarded up Dean St. Town House, one of our most favourite haunts, has become the site for an open air photographic Exhibition, #someoneofsoho, featuring portraits of local residents and workers by photographer Richard Piercy.
Kettners and Bistro 1 also provide a backdrop for his dramatic and insightful work.
Richard’s pharmacy, Zest, used to be one of the delights of living in Soho, as did Richard himself. Who needed a doctor when you had him as your pharmacist?
Today, his premises wouldn’t be much use for dispensing the Covid-19 vaccine we pray is on the way:
Richard moved out, put pharmacy behind him and turned what used to be his passionate hobby into a photographic career.
He says of this exhibition,
“It’s people who make places,”
A neighbourhood’s landscape may change, but it’s humanity that defines its character.
A deserted Soho due to the pandemic lockdown has only served to heighten this. I want to re-install some humanity and positivity back to an area I have been heavily involved in for 30 years. The people featured here are just a few of the many who contribute to the character and soul of this unique pocket of London.”
Yesterday morning I received news that brought a definite sense of Soho waking up.
A proposal headed “Save Soho” aims to designate July, August and September a “festival”, close all the streets around us and pedestrianise them so revellers can eat, drink and make merry in celebration of the restaurants re-opening.
It sounds like a great idea: Since Soho is mainly filled with restaurants nowadays – food having apparently taken over from sex – and many kinds of workplaces whose staff can work from home, it has become a complete ghost town during the pandemic. Friends in Fulham and Hampstead are beginning to meet in local cafes, to sip coffee at a safe distance from one another but there is still nothing open round here except liquor shops and The Bagel Bakery.
I start out as an enthusiast for the plan then “the writer”mentions that, if there is a spike and we remain locked down, there will be no food deliveries because of the road closures and we’ll starve. This is not a good start. Then we remember the time when Old Compton St. was pedestrianised and became an open air pub, with drunks lurching round the streets throwing up and no-one to call “Time”. And then we realise that without road access, we won’t be able to get to our garage.
Please let us try toavoid being the old, grumpy Scrooges who naysay everything. The local restaurants are where we have our best times and we do want them to thrive. There will be a compromise.
Thinking about the proposal, I suddenly want to see for myself what is going on in the streets around us.
As I walk down an empty Carnaby St. into an even emptier Regent St. the answer is -very little.
Peering through windows, I see staff in a few shops heaving boxes of stock about, readying themselves for possible opening on June 15. Otherwise, I encounter only a few aimless window-shoppers and little else. I must say, though, it is a relief to be away from the park joggers. No-one runs up and breathes in my face here.
I hadn’t realised it would be so odd to be walking in the city without being able to stop for a coffee and maybe even a pastry and I wonder why at least the prospect of doing so is important to both of us. Partly, it’s an opportunity for the impromptu. “Let’s just stop here”. So much has to be booked way ahead in London, it’s a relief to just “drop in”. It’s also the best way to enjoy the cabaret of passers-by in comfort – and of course there is the coffee – and the cake and the fact that the coffee bar was once the expression of Soho bohemianism. In the 60s, when I lived far away in North London, the 2i’s coffee bar at 59, Old Compton St. was one of my favourite Soho haunts. Skiffle was the music of choice on the tiny stage in its equally tiny basement until Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard sang there and the music scene changed.
The only thing I can’t remember about the place is what the coffee was like, mainly because I don’t like coffee and in those days it wasn’t cool to drink tea so I was the uncool kid who had to carry a teabag around to restaurants and persuade sniffy waiters to dump it in a cup, there being no pot on the premises – at least not the tea -brewing kind.
When we came to live in Soho, Bar Italia at 22 Frith St, where John Logie Baird first demonstrated how we could all become couch potatoes, was still, and remains, the area’s iconic coffee bar. It’s been there since 1949 and is still a family business
Sadly, such coffee bars – in fact most coffee bars- disappeared decades ago, only to return sanitised, respectablised, sleeked and indistinguishable in the form of Starbucks, Costa Coffee and the rest. I guess double expressos or cappuccinos didn’t cover rising rents whereas a venti salted caramel mocha frappuccino with 5 pumps of frappuccino roast, four pumps of caramel sauce, four pumps of caramel syrup with double blended extra whipped cream sounds a lot more likely to cope with those business rates.
In fact Starbucks in Carnaby St.was the only other place open on my walk, serving takeaway coffees largely drunk on the steps of The London Palladium nearby. And this, below, was the only other, sad remnant of the vibrant, buzzy social life we love so much. Good for them for keeping going.
Perhaps we shouldn’t worry about starving and rejoice in the prospect of the re-awakening of Soho.
Going out for the first time in seven weeks was quite an experience. The nearest sensation to it I have felt in my life was that of stepping from a ship onto dry land. It’s no exaggeration to say I felt not quite steady on my feet and as though I might collapse and fall. I had intended to aim for natural beauty in St. James’s Park but discovered, as a true urbanite, that what I really wanted to see were our Soho playgrounds.
The first shock was not empty streets but boarded up frontages. I had no idea the Dean St. Town House, whose staff feel like family, where I ran when evacuated from home on the day a WW11 bomb was discovered on a building site next door to our apartment, where we have spent some of our happiest, most raucous times with friends and with each other, now turns a blank face to the street along with The Groucho Club and Cote.
Dean Street Town HouseThe Groucho Club
Curiously, I have spent a surprising amount of my Lockdown time thinking about the brightly- painted doughnut shop that opened barely a week before we self-isolated.
Who are the owners? Will it survive? How excellent that they didn’t spell it “Donut”. We have watched so many small businesses come and go since we’ve lived here. It’s heartbreaking to see proud owners standing in the street, hands on hips, surveying their brave new world, and even more heartbreaking to know they may not have sufficient backing to survive even a lean first couple of weeks – and that was during the good times. To my relief, Doughnut Time is there, closed but with a notice on the door saying their doughnuts can be reached via Deliveroo. Maybe they’ll make it.
We’ve lost count of the number of restaurants we have seen installing many thousands of pounds-worth of gleaming kitchen equipment, only to see it torn out and tossed into skips as the new owners decide on different ovens, fridges and sinks – more thousands of pounds, for who knows how long this time.
I see hardly anyone on the streets. Occasional knots of delivery men, leaning on their pushbikes and motor bikes, gather on corners chatting and paying no attention to social distancing. I am masked and most people smile at me benignly, except for one squat man who deliberately bends down to unleash his even squatter bulldog right in front of me, hoping, I feel, to scare me. I smile at them both behind my mask.
In the windows of padlocked sex shops, once the mainstay of Soho, are reflected the patisseries and chocolate shops that have taken their place. I was sad about that gentrification once but today I’m glad to be back on Soho’s streets, whatever their character, and long to see them thronging with life again.
Locked down in London 