Old Compton at Dean Street Soho London.

The Soho area has been at the heart of London's sex industry for over 200 years; between 1778 and 1801 21 Soho Square was location of The White House, an infamous magic brothel described by Henry Mayhew as "a notorious place of ill-fame".

Before the introduction of the Street Offences Act in 1959, prostitutes packed the streets and alleys of Soho and by the early sixties the area was home to nearly a hundred strip clubs and almost every doorway in Soho had little postcards advertising "Large Chest for Sale" or "French Lessons Given".

These were known as "walk ups". With prostitution driven off the streets, many clubs such as The Blue Lagoon became prostitution fronts.

The Metropolitan Police Vice squad at that time suffered from corrupt police officers involved with enforcing organised crime control of the area, but simultaneously accepting "back-handers" or bribes.

Clip joints also surfaced in the 1960s; these establishments sold coloured water as champagne with the promise of sex to follow, thus fleecing tourists looking for a "good time".

Also in 1960, London's first sex cinema theatre, the Compton Cinema Club (a membership only club to get around the law) opened at 56 Old Compton Street. It was owned by Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser who produced many of the early Roman Polanski films such as Cul-de-sac (1966).


Michael Klinger also owned the Heaven and Hell hostess club (which had earlier been just a beatnik club) across the road and a few doors down from the 2I's on the corner of Old Compton Street and Dean Street.

Harrison Marks, a "glamour photographer" and girlie magazine publisher, had a photographic gallery located at No. 4 Gerrard Street and published several magazines such as Kamera, which sold from the late fifties till 1968.

The model Pamela Green prompted him to take up nude photography, and she remained the creative force in their business until they split in 1967.
The content, however, by today's standard is very innocent.

By the mid-seventies, the sex shops had grown from the handful opened by Carl Slack in the early sixties to a total of fifty-nine sex shops.

Which then dominated the square mile. Some had secret backrooms selling hardcore photographs, Beeline Books (published in America by David Zentner and Olympia Press editions.

By the 1980s, purges of the police force along with a tightening of licensing controls by the City of Westminster led to a crackdown on these illegal premises.

By 2000, a substantial relaxation of general censorship, and the licensing or closing of unlicensed sex shops had reduced the red-light area to just a small area around Brewer Street and Berwick Street. Several strip clubs in the area were reported in London's Evening Standard newspaper in February 2003 to still be rip-offs (known as clip joints), aiming to intimidate customers into paying for absurdly over-priced drinks and very mild 'erotic entertainment'.

Prostitution is still widespread in parts of Soho, with several buildings used as brothels, and there is a persistent problem with drug dealing on some street corners.

Soho continues to be the centre of the sex industry in London, and features numerous licenced sex shops.

There is a clip joint on Tisbury Court and an adult cinema nearby.
Prostitutes are widely available, operating in studio flats.

These are sign-posted by fluorescent "model" signs at street level



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