There’s enough material here for a decent 45-minute TV programme about the insidious gentrification of London’s Soho: this unique rackety-bohemian quarter is being turned into a wasteland of Starbuckses and empty investment flats while a thriving LGBT culture is being driven out. Yet this film has been padded out into a baggy, shapeless feature-length effort, distended with endless, pointless interviews, loads of video footage but no archival film material.
There is little about Soho’s literary and artistic heritage but a whole lot of naive sentimentalism about how wonderful the place used to be. Someone should have mentioned the corrupt coppers, bought sex and the objectification of women – often with violence. Incredibly, this film even wistfully talks about “clip joints”, places where customers were lured in by precisely this sexy-bohemian mythology and then separated from their money with threats. There is some valuable information on how pubs, clubs and venues can put up resistance to being wiped out by profit-driven freeholders.
