Soho
This article is about the area of London. See also New York's SoHo district, and SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. SOHO is also an acronym meaning Small Office, Home Office.
Soho is an area of London's West End in the City of Westminster. It is roughly the area between Oxford Street on the north, Regent Street on the west, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square on the south, and Charing Cross Road on the east. The area to the west is Mayfair.
Soho is named after a hunting cry, dating back to the time when Soho was a small village on the outskirts of London surrounded by fields. Its name is deliberately imitated by the SoHo district of Manhattan.
A major event in the history of public health was the study of an outbreak of cholera in Soho by Dr. John Snow. According to an apocryphal story, he identified the cause of the outbreak as the public water pump in Broad Street, and disabled it, thus ending the outbreak.
It is the heart of London's theatre area, and a centre of the independent film and video industry, as well as the television and film post-production industry. Soho is also notable as the home of London's main gay village, centered on Old Compton Street, and for the Chinatown.
Parts of Soho have a shadowy reputation. The area has been at the heart of Britain's sex industry for at least 50 years. Many licenced and unlicenced sex shops operate in the area around Wardour Street. Several of the strip clubs in the area were reported in London's Evening Standard newspaper in February 2003 to be rip-offs, aiming to intimidate customers into handing over their money and valuables. Prostitution is also widespread in parts of the area.
Soho is also criss-crossed by the rooftop free space communications laser beams of Sohonet, which connects the Soho media and post-production community to other major production centres.
Nearest places:
Nearest tube stations:
- Oxford Circus tube station
- Piccadilly Circus tube station
- Tottenham Court Road tube station
- Leicester Square tube station
Major streets in, or bordering Soho:
- Charing Cross Road is famous for its bookstores
- Oxford Street
- Regent Street is a major shopping street, named after the Prince Regent
- Shaftesbury Avenue has London's main concentration of theatres along its length
- Old Compton Street is the core of the gay village
- Wardour Street was the centre of the old British film industry, and is still the home of much of the current film industry
Notable places in Soho:
- Leicester Square is a major tourist landmark
- Piccadilly Circus is another major tourist landmark
- Golden Square is a small but attractive urban square
- Soho Square is a tiny and beautiful park