Sex Industry in Soho

The Soho area has been at the heart of London's sex industry for over 200 years; between 1778 and 1801 21 Soho Square (Manor House, 21 Soho Square) was location of the White House, a brothel described by the magistrate Henry Mayhew as "a notorious place of ill-fame". - wikipedia

Before the Street Offences Act 1959 became law, prostitutes packed Piccadilly Circus and the streets and alleys around Soho. By the early 1960s the area was home to nearly a hundred strip clubs and almost every doorway in Soho had red-lit doorbells, or open doors with little postcards just inside advertising "Large Chest for Sale" or "French Lessons Given." These are known as walk-ups (Soho walk-up).

Brothels, unlike prostitution, have long been illegal under English law, and licences to supply alcoholic drinks will not be granted against police objections. Thus, other than more or less respectable hotels where independent sex trade may be discreetly conducted, lavish brothels cannot be established.

The low end of the legal sex trade generally depended upon streetwalkers picking up clients on the street and taking them back to cheap rooms. When the Act drove prostitution (prostitution in the United Kingdom) off the streets, many clubs such as the Blue Lagoon (50 Carnaby Street) became fronts for prostitution.

In 1960, London's first sex cinema, the Compton Cinema Club (a members-only club to get around the law) opened at 56 Old Compton Street. It was owned by Michael Klinger (Michael Klinger (producer)) and Tony Tenser who later produced two early Roman Polanski films, including ''Repulsion (Repulsion (film))'' (1965). Michael Klinger also owned the Heaven and Hell hostess club (which had earlier been just a beatnik club) across the road and a few doors down from the 2I's on the corner of Old Compton Street and Dean Street.

As post-Second World War austerity relaxed into the "swinging '60s", clip joints also surfaced; these unlicensed establishments sold coloured water as champagne with the promise of sex to follow, thus fleecing tourists looking for a "good time."

Harrison Marks, a "glamour photographer" and girlie magazine publisher, had a photographic gallery located at No. 4 Gerrard Street and published several salacious magazines such as ''Kamera'', which were published from the late 1950s until 1968. The model Pamela Green prompted him to take up nude photography, and she remained the creative force in their business until their professional relationship ended in 1967. The content, however, by today's standard is tame.

By the 1970s, the sex shops had grown from the handful opened by Carl Slack in the early 1960s to a total of 59 sex shops which then dominated the square mile. Some had nominally "secret" backrooms selling hardcore photographs and novels, including Olympia Press editions.

The growth of the sex industry in Soho in the late '60s early '70s owed much to corruption in the Metropolitan Police.

The Metropolitan Police Vice squad at that time suffered from corrupt police officers involved with enforcing organised crime control of the area, and simultaneously accepting "back-handers" or bribes. However, exposés in the newspapers and the appointment of Robert Mark as Chief Constable saw this change.

In 1972 a case saw several senior officers go to jail and the attempt to introduce much tighter controls. This caused something of a mini recession in Soho which depressed property values at the time Paul Raymond (Paul Raymond (publisher)) had started buying freeholds there.Paul Raymond the King of Soho

By the 1980s, purges of the police force along with new and tighter licensing controls by the City of Westminster led to a crackdown on illegal premises. By 2000, a substantial relaxation of general censorship (Censorship in the United Kingdom), the ready availability of non-commercial sex, and the licensing or closing of unlicensed sex shops had reduced the red-light area to just a small area around Brewer Street and Berwick Street, in property largely owned or controlled by the holdings of Paul Raymond, whose legitimate business Raymond's Revuebar had increasingly and conspicuously dominated the red-light area and its trade for decades.

Soho has fifteen licensed sex shops and several remaining unlicensed ones. Several strip clubs in the area were reported in London's ''Evening Standard'' newspaper in February 2003 to be rip-offs (known as clip joints), aiming to intimidate customers into paying for absurdly over-priced drinks and very mild 'erotic entertainment'.

Although several walk-ups on streets leading off Shaftesbury Avenue were bought up and closed or renovated for other uses during the mid 2000s, prostitution is still widespread in walk-ups in parts of Soho, and there is drug dealing on some street corners - met.police.uk

Soho continues to be a centre of the sex industry in London, and features numerous licensed sex shops. There is a clip joint on Tisbury Court and an adult cinema nearby. Prostitutes are widely available, operating in studio flats, often sign-posted by fluorescent "model" signs at street level.