Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

Can You Afford a Room at

the Top?

The hardest thing for long-term inhabitants of Soho to adjust to is that it's become so (hush my mouth) fashionable.

Soho was always lovable, but raffish, naughty; visitors enjoyed its wonderful restaurants or partook of more private amusements, and then dusted themselves down, sobered up and went home to what were regarded as better places. Not to-day, when this is the better place. And everybody wants to be coming home here.

Clive James, interviewed on the radio and asked where he would most like to live, immediately named Soh , but said it would be hopeless because just watching the world go by would be so enticing he'd never get any work done. This from a man one of whose books of memoirs is “North Face of Soho”.

An equally famous media celebrity, unable to resist, has moved into my block of flats. And I can't open the front door without seeing Bill Nighy stride past, leaving flocks of women fainting in his wake. Michael Gambon may have given up sitting quietly outside a local café with a newspaper, because too many adorers just wouldn't leave him in peace, but he's probably inside somewhere. And he won't be alone. Actors and writers aren't just in the Groucho, they're in the estate agent's. A Booker prize winner lives nearby, and shops in Marks & Spencer's Food Hall, along with innumerable successful actors (the less successful ones shop in Tesco's): forget about premieres for celebrity spotting around here, all you need is a trolley.

Because this isn't just a drinking-till-you-fall-down Mecca for the famous any more, it's their hometown. Welcome to to-day's Soho – not just a rackety, polyglot village with a fabulous history, but such a desirable uptown address it's a must-have. Any well-known name is obliged to have “ Soho ” attached to it – and journalistic shorthand even claims people who aren't here really are!

I knew we were in trouble when a newspaper referred to Vivienne Westwood's Soho Couture House. Soho? Her building is in Conduit Street , almost as far from us as Bond Street and way across the massive, unbridgeable class divide of Regent Street, on the Mayfair side!

All these years nobody in Soho would have dared to claim they lived in Mayfair, but now we're so fashionable Mayfair is claimed to have moved in with us!

Tack our area's name on to anything and it immediately has a glittering cachet. People who know about good food have been dining here since the nineteenth century, as Oscar Wilde did with Bosie, but nowadays people who know nothing about food whatsoever but do know where to be seen and where not, if interviewed about their favourite hangouts, will nominate a place in some little side street which used to be foreign territory for everybody but the residents. It's so desirable that the overheads are mesmerising – the eminence behind a successful restaurant chain recently paid £1,000,000 to open an outlet in Frith Street . And he's just one of the many. If it should happen to change hands, the next time the cost involved in opening will be anyone's guess. And we are talking about property rents here; not purchases.

A previously neglected Denman Street cleft was reported to have suddenly attracted four competitors and reached a premium nudging towards half a million; Denman Street, by the way, is a tiny, narrow lane, and good luck if you want to get there by taxi – the most it'll usually cope with is a bicycle, and that'd better be on the pavement.

Dean Street 's more reasonably sized, but equally likely to be jammed, and according to the ever-reliable Evening Standard a unit there received an offer strung with zeros from another restaurant desperate to get a foothold. Eateries are slavering for Soho space: the same feature estimated that, according to market figures, it would cost more than £500,000 (no-one is daring to specify the actual petrifying amount) to open in Old Compton Street , and prices in Berwick Street were heading the same way.

Nor is it just the restaurants; it's the shops.

“At Liberty in Soho ,” I read recently, and nearly fainted. Yes, Liberty 's fabulous store has always extended back into the fringe of Soho, but, just as we equate Harrods with Knightsbridge, Liberty 's address has been Regent Street since its time began.

Not any more. If things go on as they are, it'll end up like several of the shops near me which, would you believe, have a door policy. I can remember when only the nightclubs operated like that.

Soho is so renowned that its name has been pinched and is used in other countries. New York 's had a SoHo since the 1970s, of course, but now the nomenclature is getting more specific. Such is the fame of narrow, cobbled Newburgh Street , parallel with Carnaby Street , that it was saturated by New York fashion boutiques in the autumn of 2009. We're talking about a little street which used to accommodate an electrician's, a kosher butcher and a brothel!

But you'd never know. It's cute and quaint now. Like so much of the area, it's been scrubbed up and renovated, and tourists elbow each-other out of the way to take photographs of it, post the American invasion. Now it's the Newburgh Quarter and decorated with an arched sign to that effect, like a good taste version of a McDonald's hoop.

There's a Soho in Hong Kong and another in Buenos Aires, and the way things are going there'll soon be one in the Antarctic and another half-way up Everest.

Meanwhile the landscape of the original is constantly changing, its every nook and cranny being invaded by yet another incongruous and oversized block. So valuable is every inch that buildings are being squeezed into impossible corners, as though from a nozzle of pollyfilla expanding foam. As I've written before, people once grew flowers in the spaces where houses surrounded a small but open central square. Look for them now and most have vanished: filled, capped and veneered like a celebrity's teeth. Once upon a time I could walk through a shop in Carnaby Street and out of its back door into a little garden; around the corner in Foubert's Place, the rear of a florist's premises gave on to the same space. But there is no such thing as space now – not the kind that isn't earning its keep. And the greatest evidence of this is demonstrated by the cost of actually living here.

A home anywhere in inner London , according to reports, can cost practically anything. And note the word “home”, because it doesn't mean house. (Houses are in another strata of plutocracy altogether.) Prices are rising so quickly that the media can't keep pace with them. Within a few weeks one newspaper went from quoting the cost of no matter how small a London space as £100,000 plus (which seemed to me an unrealistically low and doubtful figure) to forecasting that the minimum would rise to around £500,000 within a few years. But only days (not years) after that the same paper reported that flats in a new Council development in Hackney would sell for more than £450,000!

Chat to just about anybody and you'll discover how near we are to a £500,000 minimum already and how much over that supposed and illusory £100,000 we're really talking about.

A friend told me the story of someone he knew, left with an inheritance of £250,000 which she thought might buy a reasonable flat. She wasn't after anything large, and she was prepared to be realistic when it came to the area: just as well, considering the nearest she could get to inner London for that price turned out to be the uttermost outskirts of Middlesex!

And that tale is typical. I hear stories like it all the time, because for once the galloping newspaper headlines are understating the case. The shortage of housing in London isn't at crisis point: it passed that long ago. Eighty-one percent of employers believe the lack of affordable housing is stalling growth in the capital, according to a survey for the National Housing Federation: business is being stifled because workers are being priced out.

In other words, we're losing huge numbers of what was once the usual, ordinary working population.

And fascinatingly, a significant tranche of the people whose arrival here in the capital has aggravated the problem aren't the kind of migrants who get routinely pilloried in the Daily Mail. They aren't beggars or scroungers, they are the super-rich. Oligarchs we have heard of: in March, 2013, The Spectator ran a feature headed “The Russian Desecration of London”, lamenting the number of lovely terraces which have been scooped up, amalgamated into a single featureless space and lost for ever; describing as an instance Roman Abramovich's plan to knock together three such houses in Cheyne Walk, worth 100 million, and turn them into one vast pied a terre.

The article makes an excellent and very significant point – that this kind of destruction is relatively new: “it's only in recent decades that expat millionaires – have started tearing up the city's old fabric”.

And not only eliminating much that was lovely but also leaving fewer and fewer houses behind. The oligarchs wanted room on an unprecedented scale and, no matter what the loss to London's architectural heritage, (or places where less loaded people might live), Councils simply let them have it: Kensington, Chelsea, Belgravia, Westminster and Notting Hill are all on the Spectator's list of shame, but this wasn't just something that happened in chi-chi enclaves, it was a city-wide phenomenon.

And still is, because others with the same immeasurable financial resources have gone their own wrecking way, in the wake of the Russians. Now Hank Dittmar, the head of Prince Charles's design charity, Foundation for Building Community, has given his intelligent, informed opinion on the monied invasion, writing “We need real homes, not ivory towers”, and warning that too many “steel and glass towers” are being built for “part-time” residents from overseas. He doesn't just single out the ultra-exclusive One Hyde Park, (“virtually empty”) but points to the same problem with new flats at Battersea Power Station and the Heygate Estate in Southwark (BBC London News has joined in, covering what has happened at the Heygate, where the majority of flats have been bought by investors in Asia): as I said, a city-wide phenomenon.

But the oligarchs and their successors were only the first waves of those who regard a million as loose change. Let's hope we can cope with the next lot. Because the French are coming!

And here's why, in case you don't know: after countless battles and arguments back and forth, President Francois Hollande has finally got his way and a tax rate of 75% on millionaire earners has been introduced in France.

Gerard Depardieu's was possibly the earliest and certainly the most publicised emigration. He moved to Belgium , but then found a soul mate in Vladimir Putin, a great love for the leader's country and people, and acquired a Russian passport. The news was on the Kremlin website! Quite where Gerard will actually live is unclear, except that it'll be anywhere but France – which is the current message.

Given the tax rate and the notoriously discerning French palate, most super-rich émigrés are likelier to head West, rather than East towards a land of beetroot. And guess who's immediately West of them? Yes, of course, us.

England, and especially London, with all those lovely buildings to be knocked down or dug up (the fashion, of course, is for excavation, with properties not just being torn apart but extended floor after floor downwards, to provide room for swimming pools or private cinemas, and merrily destabilising everything around them, so that roadways collapse).

Oh, what fun, and so what if the invasion of yet more of those to whom money means nothing drives property prices yet higher and makes it even more impossible for average people to have a home.

In Soho estate agents are incredulous at the idea of the bargains some sources have quoted: do flats as cheap as a couple of hundred thousand really still exist? They scoff at such offers, all the way to the bank. A bedsitter near me – I'm sorry, I just can't call something a studio if it's too small for a pot of paint and an easel – recently went for more than half a million. And this was without central heating, and up several flights of stairs in a dark, narrow court, with no view but the blank wall opposite.

Tiny flats dependent on electric fires and immersion water heaters are going for Lottery-win money, because the exceptional lure and cachet of Soho is having the same hyperinflationary effect on the price of accommodation that it's had on the cost of starting up a restaurant.

Every time I open our local paper I read a story from someone who's being forced far away by the extortionate overheads. Or who's terrified about having to move. A Westminster Councillor who happens to be a property developer told one man that he had no right to live here: no matter that his family had done so for more than three generations.

And this is, of course, the downside to our new allure. It's the same problem that's affecting the whole of London : not enough homes for the population to live in, so that whole swathes of low-earners are being priced from the capital. But in Soho , add our current desirability to the mix and you magnify it till you threaten the known community with annihilation.

As a child of the area during the First World War, my mother saw Zeppelins overhead, dropping bombs. As a married woman during the Second World War, she lived here in the centre of the West End all through the Blitz, and then through the waves of terrifying V2 rockets. Her generation has gone, but I still have neighbours who remember their homes, and their church, being bombed out of existence. Of such is local history made. Of such people, and their descendants, are communities built.

What is true of London is perhaps especially true of Soho – that it has always been a wildly incongruous mixture of different classes, different races, and different income groups. If it becomes solely an enclave of the super-rich, it will lose the very thing that has always made it so adorable: its range of inhabitants; its diversity. In Soho a respectable family-run Italian delicatessen can be next door to a strip joint. And I don't want that to change.

I don't want to see Soho cleansed of its motley population and historic by-ways, but with every nook and cranny an Eiger of scaffolding, behind which yet another blank, bland wall of proposed retail and loft spaces are being erected, the threat of what lies in the future is terribly worrying.

We have already lost the infrastructure upon which the community used to depend: the carpenters, electricians and plumbers to whom we all turned for their skills. Soaring overheads have closed their small, cluttered premises, along with ironmongers' shops like the one in The Two Ronnies' “Fork Handles” sketch, and in which men in beige coats would debate cup hooks and glues. Don't laugh! I knew people who came right across London to Soho to search out not just coffee beans but a brilliant joiner.

No longer. Gone too are the myriad workshops where tailors and tailoresses stitched on suits. So handy for Savile Row were these craftsmen and women that a constant stream of work, pieces of jackets and other parts covered with a discreet cloth, was carried back and forth. Tailoring was once one of the most prolific trades in Soho, but now only a fraction of the old numbers are left: I love to see the elegant premises of the famous Mark Powell, just around the corner from my block of flats, but what he and a very few others have done is utterly different from the past practice. He and a couple of competitors are as fashionable as to-day's Soho itself, and instead of slaving unnamed and unknown for a firm on the other side of Regent Street, they have their own name, reputation, and list of illustrious clients right here.

Of course this is good, in fact marvellous – it would be terrible if the trade was gone from Soho altogether – but I mourn the closure of all those workshops where apprentices learned how to cut and stitch, just as others mourn the loss of Britain 's industries. Up so many different flights of stairs were tailors who wielded scissors as big as shears and tolerated nothing but perfection; I miss them: they used to lean from their windows to ask how I was getting on, and throw me a sweet.

None of them could afford what their workrooms would cost now.

But perhaps one particular incident, more than any other, illustrates the change in Soho 's status.

Back in the nineteen-sixties and film-mad, I was part of an amateur film unit. We'd congregate at the end of the day, usually exhausted and frozen, at a Literary Institute where our professional teacher and guide would tell us how to improve and what we'd done wrong. And then we'd go and have coffee, and compare notes with others as mad as ourselves. I was particularly the target of two young Australian cineastes, visiting England , who hung around the place, and whom I impressed to death: I'd seen every film they could think of, knew every book they could name, and most of all (and this knocked them sideways) I read the “Evergreen Review”.

It was a publication you either knew about or you didn't, an American literary magazine in which you'd find work by Albert Camus, Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, Vladimir Nabokov – the range and tone was extraordinary, and I especially remember a new short story by Shelagh Delaney, and being able to read for the first time “The Story of O” (“I don't know how they got away with it,” said the amazed man in the newsagents). (“Evergreen Review” ceased publication in 1973, but in the late 'nineties was relaunched online.)

My two swains asked me and another girl from our unit out for a drink, and as we talked plans were made to go on to the latest French movie (of course). My female friend already had a date and had to get back to be picked up (no mobile 'phones then to tell anyone where you were), but that didn't disappoint them – they merely performed a sort of pincer movement to get closer to me. We chatted until it was time to break up, and as we stood in the pub doorway one of them looked at the rain and asked my friend whether she had far to go. No, she didn't, she was living in the YWCA Hostel in Bloomsbury . Of course this didn't affect their smiles: we were all young and broke.

But then, as we walked on to cinema, while he held a protective umbrella over my head, one of them asked where I lived. And I said, “ Soho ”.

I'd never had the faintest self-consciousness about the area I lived in, any more than I was ashamed of the fact that my family wasn't rich. I thought Soho was fascinating, and I loved it. And I looked up brightly at the face of the young man who'd been so keen on me, and saw that it had turned to stone.

From that point onwards, neither of them spoke to me, unless there was no way to avoid it. They talked to each-other and completely ignored me, and I sat in the cinema, too shocked to know what to do, in an atmosphere of frozen distaste.

Everybody's had a bad date, but this was something totally outside my experience. It wasn't to do with being plain: I hadn't changed, I didn't look any different, and I wasn't less well-read or knowledgeable. But suddenly I was a leper, because of my home. Short of painting me with a scarlet letter, they couldn't have made it clearer that I was beneath their notice because I came from a vice-ridden slum.

That night I thought of clever, creative friends who lived in grotty bed-sits and had to share lavatories and bathrooms, and the girl in the YWCA. What had happened wasn't about money, it was about background. And, hurt though I was, I determined that no-one would ever make me ashamed of the place I came from, or that I'd be anything but grateful for it. I've made many promises in my life, but I kept that one.

In the nineteen-seventies I went on a long author-tour all around Australia , was interviewed and photographed for newspapers and appeared on innumerable radio and television programmes on countless channels. It occurred to me one night, as I read the latest bundle of love-letters from England that had waited for me at every hotel, to wonder whether those two Australians had seen any of the massive media coverage. But would they have recognised me? I wouldn't have recognised them, and I couldn't even remember their names.

In Soho, as elsewhere, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

And if I hadn't already eaten that dish long ago, I could certainly do so now. Soho the fashionable, Soho where everyone wants to live: however much I dislike the changes that have been made to it, there is one ironic plus. The same sort of stupid snobs who once despised the area and its inhabitants are now desperate to live here. But they don't make up the entire population – yet.

We still have ordinary families, with children of all ages, who attend the same state schools I went to, and are hardworking and bright. The daughter of a neighbour went on with her studies and has just qualified as a doctor, and I can't imagine any man, no matter how idiotic, refusing to speak to her because of the neighbourhood in which she grew up. It's a small consolation, but it exists.

And I do hope that something of the old Soho will manage to survive despite all that is thrown at it – survive and thrive and retain at least some of the character I loved so much. It deserves to be more than memory, no matter how vivid that memory is.

© Alida Baxter

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