Soho has been ranked among the unhealthiest places to live in Britain – shock news that sends bears hurtling into the woods and the pope saying his rosary: in other words, no shit, Sherlock. Too many opportunities to get boozed up and fill your belly with calorific takeaways, and very few parks and green spaces in which to counter the excess and choking pollution, do not a Swiss sanatorium make.
Nobody goes to Soho to get healthy, despite the recent arrival of the odd green-juice bar. They go to live the life of the flâneur, to soak up the psychic energy that generations of incomers – from 17th-century French Huguenots to the proprietors and staff of numerous Italian and Chinese restaurants, from music-hall artistes to struggling writers and artists – have imprinted into this tiny network of streets and alleys.
But the milieu that causes dysfunction also provides its cure, as Thomas de Quincey discovered some 200 years ago. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the writer recalls having a funny turn and being ministered to by Ann, a sex worker of his acquaintance: “One night, when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt more than usually ill and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho Square. Thither we went, and we sat down on the steps of a house, which to this hour I never pass without a pang of grief and an inner act of homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the noble action which she there performed.”
The “noble action” was to fetch him a glass of port wine and spices from one of the area’s many hostelries, which revivifying draught enabled him to continue his vital researches into the transformative powers of laudanum and to bring us one of the earliest and most astute examples of addiction literature.
For those of a certain cast of mind, to walk around Soho now is to walk among ghosts. At one end, just down from Liberty’s department store and the garish delights of Carnaby Street, stands the water pump that John Snow isolated as the cause of an outbreak of cholera in 1854, transforming our understanding of the spread of disease and the public health procedures that could mitigate it; at the other, now defunct establishments such as the Hungarian restaurant The Gay Hussar, the Coach and Horses pub – gone only in the past fortnight – and the Colony Room Club, where foul-mouthed hostess Muriel Belcher served endless drinks to the likes of Francis Bacon and George Melly after the pubs had shut up shop for the afternoon.
And yet we might balk at placing too great a premium on the “health” of an area, or at least put forward different ideas of what might constitute healthy. Soho would indeed score pretty low on the fresh-air index, but it would certainly go through the roof when it came to personal liberation; for confirmation, ask any member of the gay community who found a safe haven on Old Compton Street during the more repressive 1970s and 80s. It’s why the Admiral Duncan pub, bombed by a neo-Nazi in 1999, refused to remove its pride flags when they were deemed to contravene planning regulations several years later.
The threat, then, might not be the absence of bucolic pleasures – for those, you can jump on a train from nearby Charing Cross and be by the seaside in a couple of hours – but the homogeneity caused by sky-high business rates and the encroachment of chain restaurants and bars. A sanitised Soho – devoid of the roiling masses, the late-night dramas, the rubbish and detritus of near-24-hour city life – would be a poor thing indeed, however much it might send the area shooting up the clean-living ratings.
And as much as the recent survey’s top-rated spot – Great Torrington in north Devon – undoubtedly boasts its own enchantments, the ability to drink a cappuccino from Bar Italia at 3am while watching a posse of drag queens make their way exhaustedly, but still fabulously, to the night bus sure ain’t one of them.
• Alex Clark is a feature writer
• This article was amended on 11 July 2019 to reflect corrections made to the news story on which it was based. Errors in the top 10 initially distributed with University of Liverpool research findings, led Soho to be referred to as the unhealthiest place in Britain. After publication the data was revised, and showed Soho to be 10th on the list.
