Evans is a place on Earth: Soho! Square?

Very few parts of London capture the public imagination like Soho. Almost everyone has a mental image of, and an opinion on, the small, tightly locked grid of streets hemmed in by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road. It's an area so small that if you walked right round its perimeter you'd cover less than two miles. But, my, there is a lot crammed into that little box and a lot of you will think immediately of clip joints, brothels, and overpriced bars.

Not incorrectly. They certainly all featured in The Photographers' Gallery's recent Shot in Soho exhibition but so, too, did shoeshine boys, street cleaners, street punks, old ladies with fags in their mouths out shopping, and, Kate Moss. I've never personally seen Kate Moss in Soho (or anywhere else) but I've seen Jonathan Ross (in a lime green suit), Richard Wilson (walking along to a chorus of 'I don't believe it'), Peter Stringfellow, Paul Weller, Frank Skinner, and Thomas Turgoose among a random selection of celebrities in and around Soho's streets. Dara O Briain held a newsagent's door open for me once. Very polite he was.

The former hunting grounds to the west of the City of London ('soho' is believed to be a hunting cry, similar to 'tally-ho') have been captured in the songs of Warren Zevon, The Who, Soft Cell, and The Pogues, in the poetry of William Blake, and in the fiction of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. It's packed full of pubs, many with their own rich histories, basement bars, old fashioned Italian trattorias, a couple of pleasant squares (Soho Square and Golden Square), and some of its streets (think Wardour, Berwick, Brewer, and Old Compton) are proudly famous in their own right.

The ladder of streets that lead south from Oxford Street to Old Compton (Greek, Frith, Dean, and Wardour) act as a mnemonic of sorts, spelling out Good For Dirty Women (or at least that's what my friend Neill told me) which, once again, brings us back to Soho's sleazy, seedy reputation. Marc Almond couldn't have written all of those songs in Southport, surely?

William Klein - Twenty-four hours in the life of Soho (1980)

But that Soho of old, the one of popular imagination, the one of red lights in doorways, streams of piss running down alleys, and streets heaving with post-work drinkers on sunny Friday evenings, is under threat. It's changing and not everyone's happy about it. Gentrification and a new morality as regards the sex trade and the exploitation of women have certainly played a part and although London is hardly in need of yet more branches of Starbucks, Costa Coffee, or Tesco Express surely nobody can be too irked about making Soho a safer space for young women and stopping people from pissing in the street?

Perhaps more than anything else, Crossrail will be the thing that eventually alters the face of Soho most dramatically. So it's an apposite time for The Photographers' Gallery to host this small show of street scenes taken, over the last fifty years, in an area described by British sociologist Dick Hebidge thusly:-

"It was as if the whole submerged criminal underworld had surfaced, in 1965, in the middle of London and had brought with it its own submarine world of popular fiction, sex and violent fantasy".

I used to walk through it most mornings, and afternoons, on the way to work and regularly drank, ate, watched films, and attended exhibitions there. Summer lunchtimes I'd often grab a sandwich and some sunshine in Soho Square and the fact it was so packed was what gave it its charm. It was a buzz.

For me, sex and violent fantasy didn't come into it very often although, as a much younger man, me and some friends popped into a peep show one time. A woman rubbed a dildo round her fanny for a few seconds and then the window closed. I cringe now to think I was probably leaning in to the jizz of the previous 'client'.

Fun times. Alongside the Hebidge quote there's some stuff about Soho being a "village at heart" and "London's rebellious teenager" which is all a bit lazy really. A bit cliched. To be fair, a handful of the photos on show are a bit less imaginative that you'd have hoped too. It's not that it's a bad show as such. It's just that, to my mind, there's a lot more to Soho than what's been snapped here.

William Klein - Twenty-four hours in the life of Soho:Punks, young Brynners (1980)

William Klein - Twenty-four hours in the life of Soho:Backstage at the Revue Bar (1980)

Possibly The Sunday Times Magazine, even in 1980 - one year before Rupert Murdoch bought it, isn't the best paper to capture the honest side of Soho. It's not William Klein's fault. The American born French photographer very possibly fulfilled his remit (look - punks, look - tits, look - Francis Bacon pissed up) but his collection shows a partial side of Soho.

For me it's the fashions (check that brown leather jacket), the adverts for Rocky II, the grey suits, grey streets, and grey skies that really resonate. It's one thing to capture the various tribes and bigwigs of Soho but when set against the context of what the wider country, even the rest of London, looked like at the time it tells us how different, how edgy, Soho once felt.

My parents drove to London once when I was a teenager and my dad parked the car right by Berwick Street market leaving me to wander round the grid of seedy doorways and porno cinemas (!) alone. It was certainly an eye opener. At least I probably fitted in better than the supposedly 'bourgeois' chap and his wife seen in Klein's photo.

William Klein - Twenty-four hours in the life of Soho:Francis Bacon, Wheeler's, Old Compton Street (1980)

William Klein - Twenty-four hours in the life of Soho:Shoes polisher, Rocky II, etc, Piccadilly (1980)

William Klein - Twenty-four hours in the life of Soho:Christine, a French prostitute (1980)

William Klein - Twenty-four hours in the life of Soho:The bourgeois and hard core porno (1980)

HARD CORE PORNO NON STOP. His wife certainly looks more interested than him. In the intervening forty years, however, it seems the medium may have changed (those porno cinemas are long gone) but the message is still very much the same. I was unable to access any of Clare Lynch's six podcasts about living and working in Soho because a couple of elderly perverts (sorry, cultured gallery visitors) were hogging them for the whole time I was in the gallery space.

Either they were really juicy quality filth or they were simply fascinating. The aubergine emojis and reference to a 'fat young slut' suggested to me it was more likely the former. But imagine coming to Soho to get your rocks off and choosing The Photographers' Gallery as the place to do so!

Clare Lynch - Soho Then (2018/19)

Daragh Soden - Looking for Love (2018)

Daragh Soden's Looking for Love series, from 2018, showed Soho as a place where people went to find love just as much as to sate their lust. Certainly, Soho's street corners and doorways and parks will have seen many young, and not so young, couples exchanging first glances, first kisses, and even first arguments. But that didn't really come across in Soden's photos.

I mean, I'm not stupid (at least not totally stupid), I get the significance of an unmade bed and even an open door leading to some stairs which take you, presumably, up to a not dissimilar bed (though probably a bit dirtier - that could just be me) that, this time, has someone in it. But this all said a lot more about lust, a mercantile lust lacking in any romance whatsoever, than it did love.

Daragh Soden - Looking for Love (2018)

Which, if you hang round the streets of Soho in the wee small hours, you're far more likely to get offered. So, in that respect, at least it's honest. As was Kelvin Brodie's 1968 series Soho Observed. Brodie's the best in the show for looking away from the obviously titillating world of sex workers and the headline grabbing antics of postcard punks and, instead, drilling down on the unsung heroes of Soho.

Police, charity workers, and others on the lookout for young people, often runaways, who may get lured into Soho's criminal underworld or prostitution. Brodie actually grew up in London and he seems to have a less glamorous view of the city than some of the other contributors. His subjects go about their unshowy business with a quiet dignity that sits in stark contrast to the preening peacocks of the members' clubs. Most visitors will barely spot celebs stumbling from Soho House or the Groucho into a taxi. All visitors can see the binmen and buskers. It's just that many choose not to.

Kelvin Brodie - Soho Observed (1968)

Swedish photographer Anders Petersen works in a similar fashion to Brodie. People he's met in pubs, cafes, clubs, and on the street interacting with Petersen and other friends. The menu board of a wood panelled Italian cafe and a Joker fruit machine (next to a man whose pallor resembles a real life Joker) give us an insight into the real characters of Soho as well as the real character of Soho.

One of my favourite places in Soho is one of those Italian cafes. Bar Bruno on Wardour Street. I normally eat alone there (but have been with both Michelle and Simon) and I usually go for macaroni cheese (which is actually penne but they're Italian, I'm not getting in an argument about food with Italians) or cheese omelette'n'chips. With a cup of tea and/or a can of Coke. I've been going for about twenty years now and I've seen the staff grow up. They usually greet me like an old friend and even let me sit downstairs in a spare room if they're full. One Christmas they gave me a free panna cotta for my regular custom.

Anders Petersen - Soho (2011)

That's the Soho I know, love, and (now I don't work nearby) miss. Not the one, catalogued by Corinne Day, of The Face, i-D, and Raygun magazine. Not the one of fashion shoots with Kate Moss in Brewer Street flats. There's nothing, per se, wrong with Day's photos. It's just that they show a side of Soho to which I was never privy, one I would never be allowed entry, and one, quite frankly, I wouldn't want to visit. Give me drunk men by fruit machines, street cleaners, and macaroni cheese in a basement every day of the week.

Corinne Day - The Brewer Street Work:Georgina working in the living room (1996)

Corinne Day - The Brewer Street Work:George in red beret (1995)

Corinne Day - The Brewer Street Work:Kate (19930

Corinne Day - The Brewer Street Work:Rose and George skinning up (c.1994)

Corinne Day - Gaffer tape chairs (c.1996)

John Goldblatt - The Undressing Room (1968)

The last two sets of photos, by John Goldblatt and Clancy Gebler Davies, show two more sides of Soho that are invisible to the casual visitor. Goldblatt's The Undressing Room, from 1968, goes behind the scenes at a strip club and shows the human side of the performers there. Smoking fags, reading the Daily Mirror, and laughing and joking just like anyone else trying to get through another boring day at work.

Goldblatt's photos say far more about the women who work in these places than more prurient offerings elsewhere. They got him a smack in the face and a pair of broken glasses from a bouncer at Dean Street's Naked City. One he witnessed through his viewfinder!

Gebler Davies's photos of the Colony Room, a private members club, also deal in humanity and reality more than posing. These are people at play rather than at work so, clearly, they look less bored and, in some instances, more than a little inebriated. The Colony Room Club was not a place on my radar during my first years in London (where I was either trying to find where Roni Size was DJing or looking for a real ale pub in the back streets of Stockwell) but Gebler Davies, who was given rare permission by proprietor Michael Wojas to shoot there, actually makes it look like it might have at least been good fun.

There's less posing and more mucking about and I'm all for that. I'm also all for Soho changing, everything must change, but I hope the area will still be somewhere people to go to muck about rather than pose. There's nothing wrong in making it safer and cleaner but it'd be a crying shame if Soho was to become like any number of identikit town centres up and down the country with the same shops, same chain restaurants, and same chain pubs.

This exhibition, which was at least in Soho, showed a side of Soho that seems to be on the way out and, in that, it was admirable. But there was Soho before these places and there will be Soho after it. This was a chapter of the story. It's now up to someone else to write the next chapter of the tale of Soho. Following on from Dickens, Shane MacGowan, and William Blake is a big ask but I'm confident there are people out there up to the task. One quick one in The Coach and Horses and then night bus home, then?