The Shim Sham Club, which opened on Wardour Street in the mid-1930s, was described as ‘London’s miniature Harlem’. Still, it wasn’t the only queer club in the area. ‘I saw couples wriggling their posteriors, and where I saw men together, they had their hands on the other’s buttocks and were pressing themselves together.’ "Police described it as a 'rendezvous for homosexual perverts'" Comptons' history goes back to the mid 1980s, when there was a resurgence in Soho's LGBTQ+ scene. ‘Men were dancing with men and women with women, a number of couples were simply standing still,’ he said in a report. Describing the club, raid leader Detective Inspector Clarence Campion noted that he saw people ‘acting in a very obscene manner’. According to police files, the venue was under constant surveillance, and in 1934 undercover officers raided the venue.
This private members’ club in the basement of 81 Endell Street was owned by Jack Neave and William Reynolds, and for the handsome price of one shilling (or six if you weren’t a member), guests could expect ‘all-night gaiety’. Most famous of these venues is the Caravan Club, described as ‘London’s greatest bohemian rendezvous’. © Tim Boddyīy the 1930s, however, Soho had a thriving club scene, and was popular with those who committed so-called ‘immoral activity’. Traces of Soho's colourful past are everywhere you look. Among these six places was the Hotel de France on Villiers Street, where legendary LGBTQ+ nightclub Heaven now sits. In the 1920s, populist publication John Bull, a Sunday periodical, exposed ‘six notorious places’ that it had dubbed ‘bogus hotels’: spots of alleged disrepute that were said to house fornicators, prostitutes and sodomites. It didn’t take long before this gentlemen-only establishment became a renowned spot for homosexual liaisons, although it had a mixed crowd, catering to civil servants and queer men alike.
In 1896, the Trocadero Long Bar opened on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus.
"I saw couples wriggling their posteriors" The Caravan Club was briefly recreated by the National Trust in 2017 © Sophia Schorr-Kon Like so many that followed, the Cave didn’t last long, going bankrupt in 1914. This cabaret and avant garde performance club, described as ‘a place given up to gaiety’, was for all intents and purposes the first ‘gay bar’, as we would understand it today. Just two years before the beginning of the first world war, the Cave of the Golden Calf opened below a draper’s on Heddon Street. The theatres in the area became hook-up spots, particularly the London Pavilion, a musical hall that later became a part of the London Trocadero shopping centre (and which until recently, rather fittingly, housed Body Worlds: an exhibition of human bodies, preserved through plastination).ĭuring the 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde, it became clear that the writer frequented the area, kissing waiters at the Soho restaurant Kettner’s (recently re-opened) and hosting orgies at the Savoy Hotel. Oscar Wilde frequented Soho, as became apparent in his court trials. According to Historic England, a man named Jack Saul even roamed the roads, handing out cards advertising an all-male brothel on Cleveland Street. With this entertainment district came a rise in sex work, and Soho soon nabbed itself the moniker ‘the Meat Rack’. In the late 1880s, the West End underwent some regeneration: Piccadilly Circus was expanded, and theatres and music halls sprung up around Shaftesbury Avenue. By the beginning of the 19th Century, Soho had become destitute and overcrowded.