SOHO. HOW TO ENJOY ARTS, TRADES & ENTERTAINMENT

Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have visited Soho, one of the most popular neighbourhoods in London's West End. The family has had breakfast with Rosalía, who is working here on the arrangements of her new musical project, and they have talked about cultural fusion and Nubian community.

Before this wonderful and exciting meeting, the family has studied some English grammar with Adverbs of Manner and Relative Pronouns.

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Soho is an area of the City of Westminster in the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century.

The area was developed from farmland by Henry VIII in 1536, when it became a royal park. It became a parish in its own right in the late 17th century, when buildings started to be developed for the upper class, including the laying out of Soho Square in the 1680s.  

St Anne's Church was established during the late 17th century, and remains a significant local landmark; other churches are the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory and St Patrick's Church in Soho Square. The aristocracy had mostly moved away by the mid-19th century, when Soho was particularly badly hit by an outbreak of cholera in 1854.

For much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation as a base for the sex industry in addition to its night life and its location for the headquarters of leading film companies. Since the 1980s, the area has undergone considerable gentrification. It is now predominantly a fashionable district of upmarket restaurants and media offices, with only a small remnant of sex industry venues. London's most prominent gay village is centred on Old Compton Street in Soho.

Soho's reputation as a major entertainment district of London stems from theatres such as the Windmill Theatre on Great Windmill Street and the Raymond Revuebar owned by entrepreneur Paul Raymond, and music clubs such as the 2i's Coffee Bar and the Marquee Club. Trident Studios was based in Soho, and the nearby Denmark Street has hosted numerous music publishing houses and instrument shops from the 20th century onwards.

The independent British film industry is centred around Soho, including the British headquarters of Twentieth Century Fox and the British Board of Film Classification offices. The area has been popular for restaurants since the 19th century, including the long-standing Kettner's which was visited by numerous celebrities. Near to Soho is London's Chinatown, centred on Gerrard Street and containing several restaurants and shops.

The name Soho first appears in the 17th century. The name is derived from a former hunting cry. James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, used soho as a rallying call for his men at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685, half a century after the name was first used for this area of London.

Soho has never been an administrative unit with formally defined boundaries; it is about 2.6 km2 in area, and is usually considered to be bounded by Shaftesbury Avenue to the south, Oxford Street to the north, Regent Street to the west, and Charing Cross Road to the east. Apart from Oxford Street, all of these roads are 19th-century metropolitan improvements. The area to the west is known as Mayfair, to the north Fitzrovia, to the east St Giles and Covent Garden, and to the south St James's. Soho is part of the West End electoral ward which elects three councillors to Westminster City Council.

The nearest London Underground stations are Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square and Covent Garden.

In fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson had Dr. Henry Jekyll set up a home for Edward Hyde in Soho in his novel, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Charles Dickens referred to Soho in several of his works; in A Tale of Two Cities, Lucie Manette and her father Dr. Alexandre Manette live on Soho Square, while Golden Square is mentioned in Nicholas Nickleby, in which Ralph Nickleby has a house on the square, and the George II statue in the centre is described as mournful. Joseph Conrad used Soho as the home for The Secret Agent, a French immigrant who ran a pornography shop. Dan Kavanagh (Julian Barnes)'s 1980 novel Duffy is set in Soho.

More information: Soho London

 Soho has got to be at its centre.
It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers,
all those things, and I think it should be valued as such,
and protected as this centre for bohemia.

Marc Almond