Escorts in Soho, W1D and W1F: who is close, and how soon
For two hundred years the trade here was other people's entertainment, and the buildings that carried it are mostly still standing and mostly still in use. A street where musicians waited to be hired. A passage with a recording studio in it. A coffee bar cellar, a revue theatre that would not shut, an opera house that lasted barely a year. Not one of them is a landmark in the tourist sense and all of them sit inside W1D and W1F.
So this page takes the two postcodes by those places rather than by their kitchens, because they are what filled these streets at eleven at night in the first place and they still set the rhythm of an evening. Three of the twenty eight names on the board live inside the zone. Soho escorts are the easiest late answer the office has, and the plain reason for that is the length of the walk home.
On the ground
Soho in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameW1D 3DH, W1D 7DT, W1D 3SE, WC2H 7DX, W1D 3JA, W1F 8HT.
Nearest stations
Walking timeTottenham Court Road, 3 minutes. Leicester Square, 4 minutes. Oxford Circus, 6 minutes.
Getting there
W1D, W1FTravel is included across Zones 1 and 2, and counted from the moment the hour is set rather than from when she leaves.
On the board
Nearest prints to Soho
Who works here
On the board in Soho
Jasmin, Molly and Tiffany give Soho as the zone they work most, and the eight prints above are the nearest on the board tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
The street where the musicians waited
Archer Street is one block long, tucked behind the theatres, and there is nothing on it now to explain why it matters. For decades it was the hiring ground for London's dance band and theatre musicians, who stood about in it in their hundreds waiting for a bandleader to want a trumpet, or a deputy on second violin for a week. The street was their labour exchange and everybody in the trade knew it.
The practice died out when the work moved to studios and agents, but the geography explains a great deal. The musicians stood here because the pit doors of a dozen theatres were within a few minutes' walk of the spot, and that same compactness is why the zone still fills and empties twice over in a single evening.
Note 03
A passage with a studio in it
St Anne's Court runs between Wardour Street and Dean Street as a narrow pedestrian passage with doors in it, and at number seventeen a recording studio called Trident opened in the late 1960s. It had an eight track machine before the big company studios put one in, which is why bands came to a cellar in the middle of Soho to use it, and Hey Jude was recorded there in 1968.
The court is still a court, easy to walk the length of without noticing. Most of what this zone made was like that: one door on a lane with no frontage worth a photograph. It is also why the district takes so little crossing, and why a companion who works these two postcodes does it on foot.
Note 04
A cellar on Old Compton Street
At 59 Old Compton Street a coffee bar called the 2i's opened in the middle 1950s with a cellar under it about the size of a large room. Skiffle and then rock and roll were played down there to audiences who could barely stand upright, several of the first British rock singers were heard in it before anyone had heard of them, and a plaque on the front now says so.
The 2i's mattered because it was small, cheap and open late, which is the same combination that keeps these streets working now. There has never been a large venue at the centre of this district. There have been a great many small rooms instead, and the small room is still the unit an evening here is measured in.
Note 05
The theatre that would not shut
The Windmill on Great Windmill Street ran continuous revues from the 1930s and went on running them through the Second World War, when nearly every other house in the West End went dark for a stretch. It took the motto We Never Closed, put it on the front of the building, and the claim was very close to true.
That is a fact about the district rather than about one theatre. Its business has always been the hours nobody else wants, and its buildings were put up to be used in those hours: small auditoria, narrow stairs, a bar wherever a bar would fit and a door onto the pavement at the end of it.
Note 06
An opera house that lasted barely a year
The Palace at Cambridge Circus was built for Richard D'Oyly Carte, who had made his money on Gilbert and Sullivan and wanted a house for English grand opera of his own. It opened in 1891 as the Royal English Opera House with a new opera by Sullivan, ran that one work for most of a season, failed to find a second worth staging, and shut.
Within a year it had reopened as a variety theatre, and it has been a commercial theatre ever since, which is about the most characteristic outcome this district offers. The building repays looking up at from the pavement: terracotta, tiers of arched windows, and a bulk that makes sense only once you know it was built for opera.
Note 07
Two churches on the square, and the house that stood there first
On the east side of the garden stands St Patrick's, one of the first Catholic churches built in England after the penal laws were relaxed. It went up in 1792 on the site of Carlisle House, where Teresa Cornelys had run subscription masquerades and concerts through the 1760s and 1770s for a fashionable London that came here deliberately. The church was rebuilt in the 1890s and the assembly rooms have gone entirely.
Across the grass is the French Protestant Church, red brick and terracotta of the 1890s, built for a congregation founded in the sixteenth century whose numbers grew when Huguenot refugees settled in these streets after 1685. Two churches on one garden, and between them most of the reason this zone filled up with people from somewhere else.
Note 08
Who is on the board tonight, and what is next door
Three names on the board give the two postcodes as their own ground. Jasmin is the likeliest yes for a late hour in W1D. Tiffany runs later than almost anyone on the board and is entirely unhurried about it. Escorts in Soho get asked for at hours the rest of the city has stopped answering, and the office answers at those hours. Tottenham Court Road is three minutes on foot from the eastern edge, and the hotel addresses sit inside the two postcodes bar one just south of them.
East across Charing Cross Road the piazza of Covent Garden begins. North over Oxford Street is Fitzrovia, a wider and quieter set of streets. The avenue closes the zone on its southern side and Piccadilly Circus sits at the western corner. Allow about an hour after the office confirms, longer at rush hour, and the lengths are on the rates page, with the exact time sent in the chat.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Soho
Asked most often
Soho, asked and answered
Why did musicians gather in Archer Street?
What was made in the studio in St Anne's Court?
What was the 2i's Coffee Bar?
What does We Never Closed refer to?
Which theatre here began as an opera house?
One zone either way
Next along from Soho
escorts in Central London
W1, WC2, SW1Same ladder, same honest hour, the wider district this one sits in.
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.