Garuda Indonesia Colours Magazine March 2014 | Page 116

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Travel | London

Soho Square seems an age
away from the clamour of
central London. Its tree-filled
garden is scattered with
sculptures, flower beds and
ping-pong tables. But on
summer afternoons it stops
being a secret. Its lawns
disappear under a jigsaw puzzle
of sunbathers who sit or lie on
every available inch as they
picnic and chat.
Five hundred years ago they would have been
shooed away. This grass was then just one
small patch of a village-dotted landscape –
covering what is now London’s West End
– that served as King Henry VIII’s private
hunting ground. And it was enjoyed by the
royal household for a century or more until
they started selling the land off to real-estate
developers in the 1670s.
A sign in Soho Square explains the origin
of its curious name. It was a 16th-century
hunting cry – along the lines of “Tally-ho!”
that some of us still use today (in a hammy
kind of way) as we set off on a mission.
The moment a fox or hot-footed hare was
spotted, the call “So-ho!” went out – and a
hullaballoo of royal huntsmen, horses and
hounds chased after the unlucky animal.
If the cry “So-ho!” was still in common use
today, we would hear it all around here as
parties of shoppers (on the hunt for some retail
therapy) head to Oxford or Regent Streets.
Or from hungry diners in pursuit of dim sum

in the Chinese cafés along Shaftesbury
Avenue. Or even from the literary types
who roam Charing Cross Road, rummaging
in its new and second-hand bookshops.
These four iconic streets form the north, west,
south and east boundaries of today’s Soho.
And though the face of these thoroughfares
may change with the times, the district that
they enclose retains an 18th-century charm.
Its roads are cramped and cluttered – and
some are still cobbled. Many are lined with
red-bricked Georgian terraces with only the
occasional modern high-rise poking its head
above the old slate roofs. It’s all quintessentially
English: quaint if sometimes boisterous pubs
(with names like The Spice of Life) stand
on street corners; a fruit and vegetable
market sets up each day on Berwick Street;
and just occasionally you might spot a
policeman (or ‘bobby’) on his beat, striding
past a red telephone box.
It may be in the thick of one of the world’s
great cities, but there’s a small-town ambience
about Soho. So small-town, in fact, that it
could be several villages huddling together
in this cosy half-a-square kilometre. There
is the late-night bar and café scene close to
Shaftesbury Avenue; the ad agency and media
district around Golden Square; the fashion
hub by Carnaby Street; and the old mercantile
quarter on Berwick Street. People work, shop
and play here – and many live here too: in
bedsits tucked away up rickety staircases or
(for a lucky few) in elegant townhouses.
Famous residents over the centuries have
included Karl Marx, composers Mozart and
Liszt, painters Constable and Canaletto, and
Venetian playboy Casanova – artists and
thinkers, inventors and industrialists. For
better or for worse, some of these Soho-ites
have impacted on the life of almost every
person on the planet. In 1925, for instance,
John Logie Baird demonstrated the world’s
first television in an attic on Frith Street,
about a half-century after Mr Philip Morris
started making his famous brands of cigarette
on Great Marlborough Street.
Morris’s father was German – just one
of many Europeans who found a new life
in Soho. These days, for example, tens of
thousands of French nationals call London
home, so much so that the UK’s capital is also
(according to some overenthusiastic estimates)
the sixth largest French city! But this is not a
modern phenomenon: in the 1700s the
southeastern corner of Soho was so French
– the sounds, the smells, the signs – that it was
quite easy to forget on which side of the
English Channel you had awoken.

Piccadilly Circus’ statue of Eros
is iconic – and misnamed!