Seedy Soho Nostalgia

I was shocked when we went down there a while ago. It's all been gentrified and cleaned up. I was only down there to take my lad to some exotic ice cream place. I had sweetcorn flavour ice cream. It was different. I wouldn't order it again.

Anyway, walking up there from Oxford Street direction, I was quite expecting to see the dodgy clubs with the be-suited gorillas loitering around the door, maybe one or two 'ladies' in high heels, very short sparkly dresses and a roll up in the corner of the liberally-lipsticked gob, the 'revue' bars and seedy bookshops.

There used to be loads of those shops where you could enter a booth thing, with a strong dual stink of disinfectant and jizz, put a pound coin in the slot which made a metal viewing flap pop up with a loud snap, startling a very bored random lady sitting on a stool inside. It was a sort of real-life 'what the butler saw'.

The lady entertainer would then put down her Daily Mirror, stub out her rollie, remove her sparkly dress and do a little erotic dance for you, until the time ran out and the viewing flap crashed down again.

Now it's all super-expensive exotic restaurants, tofuccino cafes and overpriced tat. The tourists seemed to like it though. It was absolutely heaving with people.

 

Exotic name. I’m in. Do we have a YouTube video and one of those spider web charts ?

 

I remember going in the mid eighties with some mates.

We were all young and innocent 16 year olds and were like kids in a sweet shop.

At one point we were approached by a "lady" who must have been 80 plus. She asked if we wanted "some company". Not being Wayne Rooney we spluttered our apologies and stumbled on.

It was only later we realised that she was just drumming up business for "her girls". We may have been innocent but they needed to work on their front of house sales team imho!

Glad it's changed now though. It was very exploitative, which my testosterone filled 16 year old self was blind to at the time!

 

It’s been like that for decades. You clearly don’t get out much.

 

Not in London so much now definitely. I just see it in little snapshots.

 

Are you going to Carnaval Del Pueblo on Sunday? I would have gone but I'm going away on Saturday.

 

Unfortunately yo tampoco this year compadre.

Working both days over the weekend.

 

As I said a few weeks ago, they're starting to bring it back again, I believe that they aim for the third Sunday in August. I hope this year is bigger than last and then it can rebuild to its former glory.

 

Wait 'till you see what they've done to the docks in the east end

 

Gentrification has been going on for some time.

I had a job interview there 30 something years ago. Turned it down because of the reputation of the area.
Watching a music video VHS a year or so later and it turned out it was produced by that company, one of the largest music video distribution companies in the country. 4th worst employment mistake I ever made.

3rd was not taking up a job offer in Europe, meaning I was redundant a year or so later.

2nd was not appying for an IT role when advertised internally at my first job.

1st something again I didn't follow up on that I should have but shouldn't really elaborate.

Moral, It's better to regret something you have done, than something you haven't.

 

Soho started its long slow death rattle in the 90s and finally rolled over and died by the end of the noughties.

It’s great that the seediest bits have been cleaned up although I suspect it was just pushed somewhere else , but the complete sanitisation of the area is completely in accordance with Westminister councils corrupt and greedy policies .

Am glad I at least worked there and experienced it in the fading of its light from 1995 to 2015

 

Uh-huh.

 

If you have never been w@nked off by an elderly Chinese lady in a walk up in Soho have you really lived?

 

Well I've made it to 34 and appear to still be living, unless supporting Watford is what happens when you go to hell?

 

So nobody else here ever looked in the £1 metal flap booths? I find that hard to believe. I suppose your grandfathers never looked at 'what the butler saw' on the pier and your father never went to the pub lunchtime stripper.

You never knew what you were going to get. 18 or 80. Fat or thin. Committed or bored. In some of the more dilapidated ones, the flap timer didnt work and the performer lady had to manually open the flap and then whop it down again with a sensual flick of a finger when your time is up.

Well, the devil took all that now compadres. All the boys have now is pneumatic toothy blondes with false títs on Internet pictures.

 

I remember page 3, if that helps.

 

This thread has made me remember a chap on the old Rivals forum called polling_brasses. Would love to hear his thoughts on this topic.

 

Absolutely I did. Stopped when they started nudging to 2 quid and then hinted at 5 quid a thrill.

 

Think i'd prefer the end of this post compared to anything else in the post tbf!

 

it sounds very much like a variety box of chocolates that you get at Christmas. All anyone really wants are the milk chocolate treats, but you have to wade through all the coffee, hazelnut and strawberry fondant rubbish as well.

At least with internet porn I can search for a middle aged housewife w@bling off a midget whilst on the phone to her daughter and get that!

 

Nooo don't agree. Real life is better. Proper flesh and blood.

Every technology has its advantages and disadvantages. I learned that.

For example, sat navs are great - but we lost the human interaction and helping one another of rolling down the window and asking a pedestrian for directions. Young people can't read a map now.

Mobiles are great, but lots of disadvtanges which I don't have to list.

I don't have the technology of a washing machine or dryer, so I have to go to the launderette. Bit of a pain, but at least I get to interact with people, go and have a pint between the washing and drying cycles and my energy bills aren't that much.

Same with Internet porn - all very nice, but lacking that human interaction. Hopefully also, the old dear performing got a healthy slice of the £1 placed in the slot, rather than some mucky californian porn movie mogul taking 90% of it.

Anyway, I suppose we'll all have VR and AI Internet 'partners' soon to accommodate our every wish and desire. Human contact won't be needed at all - when you have a compliant uncomplaining beautiful partner, why would anyone want to bother with a spotty, farty, imperfect human who is reluctant to toss off a midget or whatever.

Is that better or worse for us?

 

This is beginning to sound like a plot from Black Mirror.

 

Whoa, easy Opti - the hazelnut ones are the best!

 

Certainly porn these days is "too easy".

Half the challenge as a teenager was finding a way of getting a "mucky mag" off the top shelf and presenting it to the knowing shopkeeper, hoping for that brief moment that nobody came into the shop that you knew or the shopkeeper didn't refuse you for being underage.

Thankfully it became common knowledge that a local newsagent was a "bit of a perve" and was happy to sell "specialist books and videos" to underage boys.

Even that "convenience" took something away from the challenge and the experience of getting porn from more "legitimate" sources. Looking back I think the kudos of getting the latest copy of a top shelf mag was almost as exciting as the joys it contained.

The youngsters these days are missing out on something imho.

 

The downside being when you'd share it with your mates and when it gets back to you one of the beasts had jizzed directly onto the pages, rather than into a hanky/sock.

Why did those fhuqqers feel the need to do that? Were any of you a jizz-on-the-page merchant?

 

Not one myself but experienced such deflowered publications after lending them out. Trying to peel pages apart was particularly disgusting and depressing

 

This thread is plummeting to new depths....

 

Plumbing.

 

Page-jizzer detected.

 

Of course there was always hedge porn too. Those abandoned jazz mags in the countryside.

On the railways there were STACKS of abandoned mag. Literally. I suppose Bob the Businessman would buy them to 'read' on the train hidden inside the daily telegraph and then be unable to take it home to the wife and so would tuck it down the side of the train seat.

Also in Eversholt Street next to the station, there was a shop called 'Transformations' where on a Friday afternoon you could watch Bob the Businessman go in as a regular fella and then emerge half an hour later as Roberta - the hairlegged, stubble-chinned, size 11 footed diva of the commute home.

 

I used to love the bookshops down charing X Road. You could find anything down there. Is Sportspages still there? I don't suppose so.

I used to go down there with NUR Euston branch funds and buy the most obscure books I could find on EU law and directives.

Then in the disciplines or meetings with the management, I could often come out with something along the lines of "that's all very well, but how does that comply with EU directive 71.3.91 (2005) as amended?"

 

Sadly Sportspages disappeared a long while ago now. It was bought from the founders in 2003 by a mail order company and went out of business two years later. In its heyday it was absolutely brilliant – even if it was often very, very slow paying its suppliers!

Its best days coincided with sports videos becoming more affordable and the fanzine boom, back when fanzines were irreverent verging on brilliantly savage.