Dan Snow's History Hit - Soho: London's Most Notorious Neighbourhood

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Soho was once a thriving melting pot of speakeasies, sex work and organised crime. From razor gangs of the 1920s to money laundering, the area has always been a hotbed for thieves, conmen, drug dealers, and shady goings-on… but it's also provided fertile ground for revolution, ground-breaking jazz, rock n roll and countercultural movements. Joining Dan to discuss the extraordinary history of London’s most notorious neighbourhood in the 1920s is sex historian and host of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast Dr Kate Lister. Historic Soho has been brought to life in the new BBC show Dope Girls, which tells the story of Soho when female gangs ran the nightclubs after the First World War. You can watch it on BBC iPlayer now. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. If you're in central London and you walk down the streets of Soho, you will see theatres, you will see patisseries and cafes, and restaurants serving cuisine from all over the world. From the Asian eateries of Chinatown to London's oldest French restaurant set in a beautiful Georgian townhouse. But that famous area is also now home to luxury apartments with eye-watering rents and the offices of tech start-ups and co-working spaces.

It's all really a very, very far cry from the establishments that made Soho world-famous in the 1920s. Though what I love about Soho, if you look down the side streets, you can still see traces of it. Namely, those adult shops and those old pubs that were previously gentlemen's bars. Soho was once London's, if not Europe's, most notorious neighbourhood, a thriving melting pot of speakeasies and sex work and organised crime

From the razor gangs of the 1920s the pre-war pimps and money laundering shopfronts the area has always been, and some say still is a little bit a hotbed for thieves, conmen, drug dealers and shady goings-on But it's also been an exciting place, a place for art and culture, a fertile ground for revolution, groundbreaking jazz, rock and roll, counter-cultural movements. It's been a safe place for the LGBTQ plus movement to flourish. I want to do an episode on Soho because we're all talking about the moment.

Historic Soho has been brought to life in a new BBC TV show called Dope Girls. It tells the story of Soho when female gangs ran the nightclubs dealing drugs and moonshine after the First World War. So I'm going to learn about the extraordinary history of these streets and the colourful characters that have inhabited it over the last century. Who else am I going to ask? I'm joined by the leading expert herself, sex historian, host of our sister podcast, Betwixt the Sheets. It's Dr. Kate Lister.

And just a heads up, there is discussion of drugs, of sex work, of things you might not want to listen to with your kids. Just saying. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Hi, Kate. Good to see you here in the heart-swinging Soho. Thank you very much for asking me here. We're all watching Dope Girls and what I like about this, it's got two great passions of mine. One is I used to go out to Soho all the time, it felt like an exciting place to go out when I was younger.

And two, I'm fascinated by that post-war generation, how wild it was. It was like the 60s before the 60s, wasn't it? And we've just forgotten about that. It has been called the first sexual revolution. Scholars of that period get very angry when people try and say it was the 1960s and they go, uh no, no, I think you'll find it was the 1920s and for good reason as well. And then the 1890s lads join the chat. And then the 18th century get involved and then we go all the way back until we're just amoebas in a pond somewhere. Can we start with Soho? Because there's something about Soho. I remember the streets are narrow.

It feels like, if not medieval, but sort of Georgian London. There's not many cars on the streets. There's street life there, isn't there? Even though it's in the heart of some extremely expensive real estate now. There is, and there always has been. It's got a really, really long history to Soho. And even though it's been extensively gentrified since the 1980s, it still has that slightly risque, slightly naughty feel about it. But in its earliest, earliest days, it wasn't naughty at all. It was quite a posh area. It's where aristocrats lived and they're the ones that sort of built all the big houses. And the word Soho comes from an old hunting cry where you'd go, Soho! Because it was once upon a point in time, obviously, it wasn't in central London.

It was just sort of on the outskirts. Okay, so it was a greenfield site. It was a greenfield kind of an area. And then it starts to be developed and it becomes the playground of aristocrats and rich people. But eventually, sort of about the 18th century, they start to move out. Oh, they keep going west?

Yeah, they keep going west. And it starts to become that kind of shabby, boho, chic. The properties are a little bit cheaper to buy, so people of a less high quality start moving into the area. And the thing that really does for it is it starts becoming a theatre district. And the theatre has long been associated with all kinds of naughtiness. And where there's theatres, there's drinking dens. Where there's drinking dens, there will be drunk people. And where there's theatres, there's drinking dens. Where there's drinking dens, there will be drunk people.

And where there's drunk people, there will be brothels as well. So it just all kind of grew up in this area. And then the area became notorious for it. And then it starts to sort of feed on itself as this is the destination. This is where you go. So in the 1920s, you've got this generation who've survived what they think is the greatest war in history. They're traumatised by it. They've lost lost their mates they've lost family members and they're

still very young they're coming back from the trenches like 21 22 years old so they want to go out and party and live life and i suppose to a certain extent sort of drown their sorrow they do it's kind of difficult i think for us to try and imagine what they went through and what life must have been like not just post world war one but post spanish flu as well and like the trauma of the war and you've got a generation that's just sort of like okay so well now what do we do the entire world is different everything's different and in particular women's roles are different because one thing that the war did that had never happened before is it allowed women to go into the workplace because obviously the men had to go and fight in the trenches so the home London and

everywhere back home became largely dominated by women they were the ones driving the buses they were the ones running the services in the shops they were going out to work and then the war is over the men come back and the women are like we just go back home now then do we and that was always a really difficult thing and it was never going to happen so you've got a new generation of women who have seen what it's like to earn your own money to have a career to go out and do the things that you want to do and they're not going to go back into the kitchen willingly did they enjoy not just more personal autonomy economic autonomy but also sexual autonomy is that something that went alongside that definitely

the 1920s and in fact the first world war is is notorious for it because there's but there's nothing that will change your mind faster on sexual morality than impending death i think bombs falling from the sky makes everyone go oh maybe maybe i'm not quite so uptight about this so things are changing and they were changing before that you've got the first kind of reliable contraception coming through. People are talking about it in ways that have never been spoken about it before. Sex is much more mainstream. But everyone in the ward did things differently. People are having sex differently.

It changed attitudes. And as you said, the overwhelming feeling when they came out the other side of it is, well, let's party. Reliable contraception is? Ish. It's reliable-ish contraception. So they were using cervical caps at that point. You could have gone down to Mary Stokes Clinic and got yourself fitted for a cervical cap, which is, they weren't nice and they weren't 100% effective, but there were contraceptive clinics that you could go to if you're a married woman. Surprising that it involved really invasive, unpleasant things put in women rather than just men. Of course it did. I mean, you could get condoms. You could.

But they had a reputation as being slightly seedy, something that you'd only use for promiscuous sex. And the birth control advocates were very, very keen on trying to be like, well, this isn't about promiscuous sex. This is about married life and controlling the population. So take me back to the 1920s. What can I expect as I walk down the street? You can expect fun if you know where to look for it. I suspect if you walk down and you had no idea where you were going or what you were doing, it would not be immediately obvious apart from the theatres.

This is very relatable to my life. Because drinking culture and pubs were really, really strictly controlled during the First World War and after it with the Defence of the Realms Act. They were the ones that said pubs can only open for two hours in the day and then for four hours at night. You and I both probably all love to remember when there were drinking restrictions. Sunday afternoon, they closed pubs, you had to leave the pub.

Exactly. And that was because of the Defence of the Realm Act. So it stayed in place all that time. But there were really strict rules around where you could drink who could have a license because basically they didn't want the soldiers being pissed up during the war or munitions workers or munitions workers you know it wasn't so much that they desperately cared about the health of the populace so what springs up around that is a lot of speakeasies, a lot of drinking dens, places where if you know someone who knows somebody, they can take you there. So there's that culture. And if you know where to go, then you can have a really good time. Brothels are always as discreet as they can be because they're dodging the police.

They don't want to attract attention to themselves. So they were mostly in residential spaces above shops and somebody's working out of a flat and then of course there'd be women on the street if you knew who you were looking for it's there but you need to know what you're looking for and soho was you don't think of it in those terms anymore maybe naively but soho definitely when i was growing up starting it was sex work and adult stores that was a big part of Soho's mystique. Yeah, and it has been since the 18th century, really. When you start to get sex workers moving into the area, then the area becomes notorious for it.

Then you get things like Harris's list of Covent Garden ladies, which has given out the addresses of where women work, and some of them are in what we'd now call Soho. So it becomes an area that's known for it. And then as you get into the 20th century, you've got theatres opening up, which are on the racier side of things like the Windmill Theatre. So it's a couple of decades after the 20s, but the first theatre to allow women nude on stage as long as they were stood completely still and pretending to be statues.

But you've got sort of like strip clubs start moving in after that. So it's definitely an area that's had that reputation for a good few hundred years and you got the heady sound of jazz yeah jazz came over with the americans in the first world war when they were stationed here they exported a lot of american culture i mean it must have arrived like an absolute bullet to the brain if you're imagine like you know you're a housewife in 1920s london and you've just listened to big band music and all of a sudden jazz has arrived and it's fun and it's fast and it's naughty and people are really worried about it like you know like oh it's oh don't listen to that it's terrible the nazis hated jazz well

except when they're in private and they all listen to it i'm sure but like yeah in public yeah i hated it sort of disease well and they did in its earliest, when it starts to get exported and even in America, people thought of it like that. It's this moral degenerate. And of course, because it's associated with black culture, there's a racism that goes with it of like, oh my God, these black people coming over

and infecting our decent white girls. That narrative runs through it the whole time, but it absolutely electrified the entire world. And so it becomes a centre of jazz clubs. Yeah, it does. Yeah, jazz. And you would go and dance. We don't really go and dance anymore.

I mean, I don't even go to a club and dance, but dancing at this point in history was a really, really big thing. And if not everyone was going dancing in underground jazz dens, you'd go to your local village hall and have a dance. That's the thing that you did for fun that's where you met your partner right yeah it was like the social event that you'd go to but along with jazz the style of dancing starts to change you get the flappers coming through with the charleston the hemlines are going up the dance is getting a bit more

raucous it must have felt really dangerous and exciting that particular period just come back to that first point this is a generation of men and women who've especially the elite the officer class suffered disproportionate high casualties so the people with money the people aristocratic connection they'd have known reams of people that weren't there anymore so they must just thought we're lucky to be alive let's just party let's just do it yeah sod it the roaring 20s i think everyone was aware that they'd come through something absolutely horrific and that the world was different i think it was a lot of anxiety as well though you know a sort of a sense of what happens now what do we do now and there was this moral panic around young girls and around jazz clubs and around drink and drugs and about how

society is crumbling and decaying all around us and soho was an epicenter for that let's talk about drugs because again you associate that with a with a later cultural and sexual revolution but so people are taking drugs they've always taken drugs they've people have always what are you saying it's as long as there have been drugs there have been people that take them but things start to change in the 1920s because the law starts to get involved and you get this creation of this image of the drug fiend the drug addict up until that point it was well known that people could abuse drugs like in the 18th century thomas de quincy writes confessions of an english opium eater but there was a sort of a sense of almost like oh you silly goose getting all messed

up with that it wasn't this idea that a dope fiend was an actual thing. Like there wasn't this understanding of addiction that we have today. But that starts to change in the 1920s. And one of the reasons for that is because the government has to crack down on drugs because their soldiers are getting stoned. That's what they're worried about is it's not so much that they are desperately concerned about the welfare of their citizens it's that they can't afford to have soldiers off their face on opium or unbridled cocaine use there was also lots of reports coming into the police about how young men had been fed cocaine by nefarious sex workers in soho and they just couldn't remember

anything afterwards and this kind of narrative. Yeah, of course. That's what you tell the wife when you get home. Exactly. So the first drug laws start to be passed under the Defence of the Realm Act, which was basically that stop taking drugs was sort of the big one. And the police could start to raid places. They could start to confiscate it.

And then you get this weird legal landscape because doctors could still prescribe it for pretty much anything toothache headache flatulence opioids yeah okay and cocaine as well cocaine as well yeah cocaine becomes really really big and it's you know in when they first start using it it was this sort of medical miracle drug of it's going to fix everything it's good because it peps you up and it makes things seem a bit more exciting. And so it's touted as this medical panacea. And then eventually people start to realise, oh, hang on a minute,

it's not quite as good as we thought it was. But it's still prescribed for loads of stuff. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's all about Soho. More after this. Does opium cure flatulence? Asking for a friend. There were medicines containing opium that were marketed to do that.

I am not a medical person, but I think it would probably take everyone into a room to the point where they didn't care. So would that help? If you all take opium, it would cure, say, all my friends. Yes, yes, exactly. Because no one would care anymore. But you get opium dens cropping up all over the place and they're in this kind of weird legal limbo of, well, can we arrest them? Can we not? Is it medicinal? Is it not? This thing comes into force where if you're poor and you're caught with drugs, you'll be arrested. If you're rich, then you have a medical issue. Drugs rise, opium, some cocaine and cannabis.

Cannabis was around, but it wasn't as prominent. You don't get the first tightening of UK laws around cannabis until it's like 1928. And then that becomes this sort of marijuana menace idea that comes in a little bit later. So it was in the mix, but it wasn't as much cause for concern. It's always a good sign if they're tightening up laws, you know, that in the years preceding it, there's something going on. Yes, somebody has been doing something that they shouldn't have been doing. That's always the red flag for a historian. Were there any famous bars and clubs? Were there any famous bars and clubs?

Oh, yeah. If you were in 1920 Soho, you would want to go to the 43 Club, which was run by the queen of nightclub life, Kate Merrick, who was born in Dublin, so she's an Irish woman. And she marries a doctor, she's separated from him, and she ends up in London with eight kids that she has to support at the age of 43, which is not a great situation to be in. And she sees an advertisement that somebody needs some help running a tea party or a tea dance or something. So she gives that a go and then she thinks, sod this, and she decides that she's going

to open the 43 Club on Gerrard Street in Soho. But that wasn't an easy thing to do because of the Defence Against the Realm act saying we can only sell alcohol for two hours a day and until 8 p.m and she just did it anyway she did it without a license she did it without a venue license she just she just opened it she spent loads of money building this club and then it became the go-to place like Tallulah Bankhead went there, Evelyn Waugh went there, the bright young things, beautiful set, and it was raided repeatedly, like constantly, just bam, bam, bam, and she went to jail several times and she becomes this celebrity in her own right

and the public can't get enough of her because every time she's in the dark, she's there draped in furs and diamonds and just coming up with things like well if you were in a nightclub this is what you have to expect it's like people just adored her and the worse she got the more they they loved her for it i think one of the worst things that she bribed police officers in the end to tell her when there was going to be a raid and she got caught doing that and sent to jail again but yeah she became lond London's nightclub queen and made a ton of money doing it.

Sent all of her kids to private schools, but just was repeatedly arrested, raided, and then her health suffered. I think she was like 59 when she finally died, but she was legendary for it. And tell me about the real life dope girls. The real life dope girls. It was probably a case that the media spoke about them

and made them into more of a thing than they actually were. But it was symptomatic of a panic of drug abuse, basically, of drug addiction. And you have to remember the 1920s. No one's really spoken about addiction and drugs in this level of a prominent way before. Now we're so used to people talking about drugs and addiction. It can still shock us, but it doesn't have that novelty that every single paper will be running stories for months and months and months and months. The dope girls did that. They became symptomatic of post-war crisis. And really what it is, is it's young women come into London to try and make their name and getting caught up in drugs and wanting to take loads and loads of drugs. And

they were centered around Soho. Some of them were working in some of the nightclubs some of them were dancing soho also attracted the aristocrats so you get some people from quite wealthy backgrounds drugs are absolutely everywhere and you do start to get stories emerging in the press of overdoses of deaths occurring and then every single time that happens it blows up again of like dope scared dope girl fiend degenerate and you can imagine like everybody you know in who isn't in soho and off their face just little housewives and their husbands just sat reading the papers oh god absolutely terrible and they're kind of like living vicariously through that so they're they were definitely there and it was how can you say it in any more succinct way? It was young women who were off their faces in the 1920s. The flapper age, the fast set jazz.

It Girls Before It Girls. by them. One of the first It girls to be known more for her addiction than anything else was Brenda Dean-Paul. And she started out as an actress. She kept trying to act all throughout her life, but she was basically more famous for being an addict than anything else because the police would keep arresting her and then it would be in the press and then she'd get taken to court and then it would be in the press. And she fed on it. She published an autobiography, which is just basically how much drugs she takes. Do remember like the press were at its worst when amy winehouse was clearly very ill and they were obsessed with that and they're just everyday running stories about her that was exactly what was happening with brenda dean but in the 1920s

so recognizable so recognizable so recognized well that same level of obsession and oh my god what's she doing to herself it's's absolutely terrible. That same obsession about this excessive life that she's living. But also the papers can't stop writing about it and we can't stop reading about it. And presumably they're all young, glamorous, socially rich and powerful. You can see why it's a great story. Brenda Dean-Pole was very beautiful as well. She had that real chiselled look and she never lost her look. She was always beautiful. So you have super glamorous. She comes from not quite an aristocratic background, but her mother was a composer, I think, so quite a well-known background.

And then there's this young woman who's been attracted to booze and jazz and drugs and men and isn't it terrible? Yeah, that was her story. One of the first stories of the Dope Girls to really capture the press's attention and horrify the nation was of a young actress called Billie Carlton, who died in 1918 just as the war is drawing to a close. She was only 22 years old. And Billie was quite a successful actress. She was the darling of the stage. She was really popular.

The press were already writing stories about her. She dies of a suspected cocaine overdose. Bodies found. And then the inquest for that, it comes out about the lifestyle that she had been living and the people around her had been living. And how much of it is true and how much of it was press hysteria, but by the time they were done telling the story that there'd been cocaine-fueled orgies and absolutely awash with drugs. And there was a link made with the Chinese immigrant community

in London. Just one guy who was married to the woman who might have given Billy the drugs. And that was enough to create this image of the Chinese immigrant opium den, always a man preying on young, innocent white women, which was how Billy was portrayed, being seduced, being force-fed these drugs and then meeting a terrible, terrible end. And it becomes this image that the media absolutely runs with, end and it becomes this image that the media absolutely runs with of these Chinese opium dens drawing in innocent white girls and that was all linked to the Billy Carlton case so it's a story about a celebrity but also drugs race and migration as well yeah yeah and you get the Fu Manchu novels that were written by Sax Roma were based in part on what was happening in Soho, presenting Chinese men as these sort of evil degenerates who are preying on unsuspecting young women. It became a real thing. It just sounds like a classic moral panic in a way, doesn't it? So nice white women,

young women from good families, disappearing into that London, into a den of iniquity where they're preyed upon by foreigners, experimenting with new drugs. I mean, it just feels like it's got all the elements that now are very recognisable. It does. And it was for the first time. So this is all very new. The novelty of it keeps it going for years and years. And of course, unchecked racism kept it going as well. The threat of Chinese opium was known as the yellow peril in the press at the time. And yes, it was a story that they ran and ran with. It was a moral panic. Yeah, it's just a classic moral panic.

It is. And they had characters in and around Soho that they used to fuel that. So one of the most notorious characters in the drug trade was a guy known as Brilliant Chang. He'd come from Canton originally. I think he was born in like 1885 or something like that. He comes to Britain and originally starts working in restaurants. He owns restaurants and quite quickly realizes that you can make a lot more money selling drugs instead of food. So he starts selling drugs cocaine predominantly to his customers some accounts say that he would only sell to pretty white women how accurate that is i'm not

entirely sure but he becomes this enfant terrible in the british press of like every time he gets mentioned it gets worse and worse there's some dispute about how involved in drugs he actually was and how much the British press, because by the time the British press were done, they were calling him Britain's Dope King. And it's like, he might have been Britain's Dope King, or he might have been dealing out of his restaurant. But he became the focal point for the British press. He became everything that they hated. And he had a very colourful life women loved him it would seem he was very charming and he was implicated in a few deaths from overdoses but nothing was proven it sounds like

sometimes these people enjoyed the press tension almost leaned into it it does bit for someone like brilliant chang the press intrusion so he gets put on trial because he's implicated in a case involving a woman called Violet Payne, where she's caught with drugs and the police say that he's the one that gave them to her. He's found not guilty of it, but the press focus on him makes it almost impossible for him to live his life in London. It certainly makes it very difficult for him to deal any drugs in London because now everybody knows who he is. Everyone knows his restaurant. He's got this awful reputation. And eventually he is arrested for drug possession on slightly, not jumped up charges, but it's almost like the police went, oh my God, there's some cocaine, quick arrest him. And then he gets put in and then he gets deported and we don't know what happens to him. Really?

Yeah. And he was the supposed dope king of Soho. Does the government act? The government acts eventually. So they're using this Defence Against the Realm Act, which covers an awful lot. It was basically brought in so the government can go, if anything might be upsetting the war effort, we can do something about it.

But eventually that gets crystallised into the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, which then makes possession of cocaine and opium illegal but also you are still allowed it for medical use. So it's a slightly grey, weird area and the British way was that was slang for the fact that your doctor could just prescribe anything to you. So that was still how most people could get hold of it quite easily.

And do you see, is there an attempt to clean up Soho? There's always attempts to clean up Soho? There's always attempts to clean up Soho. There's always attempts. And it becomes, like, Soho becomes this repository of everything that's wrong in the country. Everything's been projected onto it. So there's constant efforts to shut down the nightclubs. The MPs, politicians are always trying to say,

we're going to clean up this menace. But of course, people really like going to the nightclubs. So it was always going to be an uphill struggle for them. But yeah, there's always attempts to clean it up and they usually fail. One of the amazing things about the modern day is that now people talk with nostalgia about nightclubs. They're closing because everyone's just sitting at home on their devices. All the politicians are like, we should be out dancing and drinking like we were when I was young. Yeah, the MPs from the 1920s would have loved that.

If only they'd known, they just had to give people iPads. That was all that had to happen and they could have fixed it all. So Soho survives. The government cannot shut it down. It remains exciting and seedy and fun all the way through to the late 20th century. It does. But the thing that does for it eventually, because if you walk around Soho today, the thing that does for it eventually because if you walk around soho today it become immediately obvious there aren't any opium dens or um illegal nightclubs or the flappers have long since moved out and it's quite gentrified the thing that did for it in the end wasn't the repeated police crackdowns or it wasn't them trying to change the laws or bring in drugs it was money it became the

trendy area to be so people start buying up the property this is what happens you see this replicated all over the place an area becomes like super cool because it's kind of edgy it's kind of like cool and you know this is where the the naughty stuff happens so then it becomes a popular area to buy in and then people start buying it you see that in notting hill that's happened there as well that used to be quite a sort of edgy like urban area and then until the yummy mummies moved in so what happened in soho is it gets gentrified and then because there's more money in the area more people are living there it's easier to pass laws about you know residential committees and people saying well you can't have that you can't have that and

soho was forced to clean up its act it hasn't completely cleaned it's still got that thank goodness it's got a twinkle inside yeah and I guess the population collapsed in 19th century to the mid-20th like some 17,000 people used to live there it got down to 3,000 people living there is it are people moving in again or is it all cool artistic studios I don't think i mean i think you can still buy property if you wanted to but it would set you back a lot this is a long time since you could just afford some dives above an opium den for a bag of raspberries and a shilling okay you're thinking about the big move south i see you as an i see you as a so i would i would love to live in soho but you'd need you need so much money to do it but I think now it's mostly businesses I don't think it is mostly residential Soho anymore well thanks Kate you give me all the

context I need now to enjoy my binge watch I'm going to check out Dope Girls on BBC iPlayer well a huge thank you to Dr Kate Lister of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast as I say you can check out Dope Girls on BBC iPlayer now. And don't forget to hit follow in your podcast app to get more Dan Snow history, wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.