page_title: Soho
section_title: Sex industry
hierarchical_section_title: Soho / Properties / Sex industry
context_page_description: Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century.
  The area was developed from farmland by Henry VIII in 1536, when it became a royal park. It became a parish in its own right in the late 17th century, when buildings started to be developed for the upper class, including the laying out of Soho Square in the 1680s. St Anne's Church was established during the late 17th century, and remains a significant local landmark; other churches are the Church of our Lady of the Assumption and Saint Gregory and St Patrick's Church in Soho Square. The aristocracy had mostly moved away by the mid-19th century, when Soho was particularly badly hit by an outbreak of cholera in 1854. For much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation as a base for the sex industry in addition to its night life and its location for the headquarters of leading film companies. Since the 1980s, the area has undergone considerable gentrification.
context_section_description: The Soho area has been at the heart of London's sex industry for more than 200 years; between 1778 and 1801, 21 Soho Square was location of the White House, a brothel described by the magistrate Henry Mayhew as "a notorious place of ill-fame". Shortly before World War I, two rival gangs, one led by Chan Nan (also called "Brilliant Chang") and the other by Eddie Manning, controlled drugs and prostitution in Soho. Both were eventually arrested and imprisoned; Manning died midway through a three-year sentence in 1933. Following World War II, gangs set up rings of prostitutes in the area, concentrated around Brewer Street and Rupert Street. Photographers also visited Soho in the hope of being able to blackmail people caught in the act of visiting prostitutes.
  When the Street Offences Act 1959 drove prostitution off the streets, many clubs such as the Blue Lagoon at No. 50 Carnaby Street became fronts for it. Gangs controlled the clubs and the prostitutes, and the police were bribed. In 1960 London's first sex cinema, the Compton Cinema Club (a members-only club to get around the law), opened at 56 Old Compton Street. It was owned by Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser who later produced two early Roman Polanski films, including Repulsion (1965). As post-war austerity relaxed into the "swinging '60s", clip joints also surfaced; these unlicensed establishments sold coloured water as champagne with the promise of sex to follow, thus fleecing tourists looking for a "good time." Harrison Marks, a "glamour photographer" and girlie magazine publisher, had a photographic gallery on Gerrard Street and published several magazines in the 1950s and '60s. The model Pamela Green prompted him to take up nude photography, and she remained the creative force in their business.
  By the 1970s, the sex shops had grown from the handful opened by Carl Slack in the early 1960s. From 1976 to 1982, Soho had 54 sex shops, 39 sex cinemas and cinema clubs, 16 strip and peep shows, 11 sex-orientated clubs and 12 licensed massage parlours. The proliferation of sex shops dissuaded some people from visiting Soho. The growth of the sex industry in Soho during this time was partly caused by corruption in the Metropolitan Police. The vice squad at the time suffered from police officers enforcing against organised crime in the area, while simultaneously accepting bribes. This changed following the appointment of Robert Mark as chief constable, who began to crack down on corruption. In 1972 local residents started the Soho Society in order to control the increasing expansion of the sex industry in the area and improve it with a comprehensive redevelopment plan. This led to a series of corruption trials in 1975, following which several senior police officers were imprisoned. This caused a small recession in Soho which depressed property values at the time Paul Raymond had started buying freeholds there.
  By the 1980s, purges of the police force along with pressure from the Soho Society and new and tighter licensing controls by the City of Westminster led to a crackdown on illegal premises. The number of sex industry premises dropped from 185 in 1982 to around 30 in 1991. By 2000, substantial relaxation of general censorship, the ready availability of non-commercial sex, and the licensing or closing of unlicensed sex shops had reduced the red-light area to just a small area around Berwick Street. Although several walk-ups on streets leading off Shaftesbury Avenue were bought up and closed or renovated for other uses during the mid-2000s, prostitution still takes place in walk-ups in parts of Soho, and there is drug dealing on some street corners. Much of the business has been reported to have been run by Albanian gangs. By the end of 2014, gentrification and competition from the internet had reduced the number of flats in Soho used for prostitution, but the area remains a red-light district and a centre of the sex industry in London.
caption: St Anne's Court in the early 1960s
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