July 20, 2013 |
Old Compton Street and the built-up, tumbledown 20-metre radius that surrounds it is a perfect walk for a people spot – we know, we work just round the corner. Here are just a few of the tribes who call London’s Soho their own.
OLD COMPTON STREET (MEETS WARDOUR)
Like the new antibiotic-resistant strains of sexually transmitted diseases passed from hole to hole in filth clubs in London’s Vauxhall, the spread of the “Sitgesbeard” is seemingly unstoppable. This bizarre set of hairy parenthesis keys, which sit either side of the face at the temple and continue in a very straight, very deliberate line to stop an inch above the chin, are worn by treacle-brown fags working a sporty, branded pair of shorts or grey-marl track pants chopped raw at the knee. Flabby-tongued sneakers and sleeveless tees have armholes slashed around 8in to expose pits and worked-out abs. It’s the most recent addition to a queer uniform and has its roots in Spain, Portugal and the gay beaches of Brazil.
OLD COMPTON STREET (MEETS GREEK)
It’s 9pm, Linda and Sue and dozens of other middle-aged hausfraus file into the street after another successful night at Old Compton Street’s Prince Edward Theatre. Musical abhorrence Jersey Boys is ringing in their ears. Before stepping up into one of those uninsured death-trap rickshaws, they catch a conversation outside sixth circle of hell bar GAY. A man with teeth like a bag of burnt chips talks about cocks and drugs – there’s no stopping him: “Ooh! ’Av had her. And her! She’s gor an arse like an ’ippo’s yawn, dear. ’Ere, let’s pop to dV8 and get totally fooked on bath salts.” And another cliché box is successfully ticked.
GREEK STREET
It’s 8.30am. Pippa has a meeting with a potential client at Greek Street’s Soho House. They’ve told her you can’t reserve a table at the private members’ club, but if she’s prompt, chances are she’ll be fine. “Skinny wet cappuccino and a soda bread toast. No, no butter, thanks– keeping off the pounds.” That rabbit gilet always looks smart and she wore it when she won the Seiko watch account but that was three years ago; PR accounts have been thin on the ground since the recession, and what with the two kids, Vita and Wolf, to put through prep school… it’s best not to dwell.
Wolf, lovely Wolf. They had thought about George – you know, old “English-y” –but that’s a bit 2007; then something Irish that’s a bit “actor-y”, but they neither want to define a role for him nor suggest he’s a boy (“I mean, he may want to wear pink, or be a hairdresser or something”). So in the end, over a gorgeous little bottle of chab’ they picked up in Waitrose, they decided that their “little man” should have a noun name.A good, solid substantive that sounds substantial. Wolf, short for Wolfgang. Well, he sounds like a lawyer or, better still, a banker. Not that they want to define him in any way – “I mean he may want to wear pink or be a hairdresser or something.” Just imagine, if Pippa’s luck is in, you could be talking to the new press exec behind the UK’s relaunch of Tampax. She’s keeping everything crossed.
DEAN STREET
Dan makes soda bread at home. He’s just parking his fixie. Got a meeting. Dan signs off his emails with LMGT4Y, meaning “Let me Google that for you”, an inane sign-off, the new “goodbye”. It will be something else next week. Dan says most revolutions were started by people under 30. Dan is 37 and predicted, quite rightly, that revolutions are happening all the time, all around us, everywhere. And that the digital age was the revolution everybody talks about, but he’s more interested in how “middle age is, like, totally the new ‘being 20’”. Dan is 37 and has a beard. And a fixie bike, the one he’s parking.
BERWICK STREET
If you hover around the not-so-super supermarket Budgens you can see them looking around twice, holding nobody’s gaze, before they walk up the filthy wooden stairs to see a hooker. They normally read about the girls on the internet – those steamy calling cards you see in telephone boxes aren’t as popular as they used to be, we’re in a digital age. The internet has been great for the fanny racket.
Perhaps this chap has been on one of the many forums that rates prostitutes: “She could swallow an apple through a letterbox,” says one.
Soliciting still goes on. Two of 10 Men’s favourite girls stand in the centre of the pavement across the street from Madame Jojo’s tranny bar, which forces you to engage with them, have eye contact: “Looking for business, love?” They still do say this, by the way. The internet marches on but some things stay the same. Nice, in a way.
PETER STREET
Supreme: home of buttoned-up shirts (it’s a bit yesterday). In an alley that smells like Big Foot’s scrotum sits hit-with-the-kids skate store Supreme. Here young skinny lads in tight jeans mull over the latest cotton shirt and snapback cap while staff look on surlily. How many variations on exactly the same thing can one sell? By the lack of stock swinging in the store, a lot.
SHAFTESBURY AVENUE
Downstairs in sci-fi retailer and Dr Who specialist store Forbidden Planet. “We’re doing Jane Austen for A level – they’re all vampires, I swear. Oh my God, we should totally do a Jane Austen vampire film on YouTube; it’ll be huge. I can wear those fangs.” Everybody laughs. Cody and his best friends are “weekend goths”. There are about 14 goths in their sixth form college just outside Barnes and they are “totally misunderstood” by everybody, especially their parents, who “wouldn’t care if I, like, died, or was blind or in a wheelchair”. Cody has recently become Wiccan, as “Wicca has no restrictions or injunctions against homosexuality, bisexuality or being transgendered”, and seeing as Cody thinks he’s bisexual (everybody is bisexual at college) and he sort of can’t stop looking at pictures of Bowie in his Thin White Duke phase, then he is most certainly bisexual and once thought of his games teacher naked when he had a wank. Cody is not bisexual but daren’t admit he’s straight because that’s so average. “Straight just isn’t nowadays.”
by Richard Gray
Richard Gray is executive fashion director of The Sunday Times Style
