' When the respectable Londoner wants to feel devilish he goes to Soho' wrote Thomas Burke in 1915
- but these words could have been uttered at any point in Soho's colourful history From humble beginnings Soho developed into a fashionable centre for London's nobility in the eighteenth century This same area was to become a poverty-stricken Victorian hub of cheap lodging houses the Soho of the devastating cholera outbreak of 1854 A new focus on business & manufacturing transformed Soho in the late nineteenth & twentieth centuries In the 1960s Carnaby Street became the fashion & retail centre of the world The nightclubs of Soho played host to the Teddies Mods Rockers Punks & New Romantics of post-war British youth culture Complete with illustrations evoking the life & times of Soho this new history explores the people & places that brought the area to worldwide fame