Soho

Not only every Londoner but every man who feels that he has a stake in London, has his special Soho restaurant, where in his opinion you get the best value combined with the most genuine continental atmosphere and which he is reluctant to recommend for fear that it will get “spoilt.” Soho is unique. Bounded on the north by Oxford Street, on the west by Regent Street, on the south by Coventry Street, on the east by the Charing Cross and Tottenham Court Roads and cut across by Shaftesbury Avenue, it is, wrote Galsworthy, “untidy, full of Greeks, Israelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, colored stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, [and] dwells apart from the British Body Politic.”

Gilbert Cannan, that bright, brief flame of the 1910 decade, described it as “a vibrant nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met and fused or clashed together to make a froth and a spume . . . chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that knew no tradition or had escaped from it.” For those very reasons it has a peculiar fascination for an island race that longs to “get abroad.”

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Alec Waugh

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Not only every Londoner but every man who feels that he has a stake in London, has his special Soho restaurant, where in his opinion you get the best value combined with the most genuine continental atmosphere and which he is reluctant to recommend for fear that it will get “spoilt.” Soho is unique. Bounded on the north by Oxford Street, on the west by Regent Street, on the south by Coventry Street, on the east by the Charing Cross and Tottenham Court Roads and cut across by Shaftesbury Avenue, it is, wrote Galsworthy, “untidy, full of Greeks, Israelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, colored stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, [and] dwells apart from the British Body Politic.”

Gilbert Cannan, that bright, brief flame of the 1910 decade, described it as “a vibrant nondescript region where innumerable streams of vitality met and fused or clashed together to make a froth and a spume . . . chaotic and rawly alive, compounded of elements that knew no tradition or had escaped from it.” For those very reasons it has a peculiar fascination for an island race that longs to “get abroad.”