Can Soho be saved?

For centuries, Soho has been the beating heart of late-night London: a sleazy, seductive neighbourhood associated with everything from songwriters to sex shops. So when legendary New York jazz club Blue Note decided to open a branch in a basement on nearby St Martins Lane, it seemed like a perfect fit. That is, until a series of baffling and antiquated objections from the police and local residents flooded in.

The Met’s submissions regarding the Blue Note hint at the wider problems facing cultural spaces in central London: officers admitted that they weren’t concerned about the club itself, but the idea of more people staying out late, and the theoretical risk of phone theft or unlicensed cabs their presence might create. An objection from a member of the public lamented that revellers might be “slightly disorientated by their emergence into the cool night air” and fall prey to criminals as a result. Any notion that authorities should focus on actually policing that illegal behaviour, rather than preemptively blaming music venues for it, was conspicuous by its absence. The council ruled that the club could open, but with reportedly “unviable” early closing times.

The Blue Note saga is far from the exception. Like much of central London, the last decade has seen Soho’s historic identity eroded, as rising rents and shifting tastes mean that music venues and late-night debauchery have been gradually replaced by luxury flats, half-empty office blocks and chain stores. On Tuesday evening, Westminster City Council launched their latest attempt to arrest that decline: their new “Westminster After Dark” initiative is the product of more than a year and half spent talking to local businesses and residents, as well as learning from other stories like Sydney.

Stemming from the Greater London Authority’s recommendation in 2021 that individual boroughs should develop their own late-night policies, this new strategy promises to “create a vibrant, culturally diverse evening and night-time environment”, balancing the needs of people living in the borough and those who head there for escapism and reversing the slow hollowing-out of late-night central London.

This contrasts starkly with Westminster’s recent approach to venues like the Blue Note — it’s clear that “Westminster After Dark” will need to change not just public perceptions, but those of the council itself. As with so many of these policy pronouncements from local councils, the mayor’s office or central government, the real-world impact of politicians’ warm words and bold strategies will take time to emerge.

The measures are billed as Westminster’s “first strategy dedicated to shaping the evening and night-time environment”, but the general principles are reheated from their existing policies on culture and business, which talk in similar terms about “[enhancing] day, evening and night-time economies”. One of the main criticisms levelled at Amy Lamé during her eight years as the capital’s night czar was that this kind of policy-speak had minimal effect on the material reality of club closures and job losses. We’ve heard this stuff countless times before: so what’s actually changed?