FROM HUNTING HORNS TO THE RAYMOND REVUE BAR: A DAY OUT WITH THE ROTARY CLUB IN DEEPEST SOHO


The Hornchurch & Upminster Rotary Club have been to some funny places in their meandering around London under the eccentric guide of Dick Palmer – for some reason Dick seems to prefer to take us to low dives and odd sights, emphasis- ing the unglamorous and seedy side of London‘s life.


So when 20 Rotarians, their partners and friends, gathered at Leicester Square Un- derground Station last October to be led into old Soho, further tales of death, de- struction and moral turpitude were ex- pected – and they were not disappointed.


Soho, comprising an area roughly


bounded by Charing Cross Road in the East, Oxford Street in the North, Regent Street in the West and Leicester Square in the South, became Crown Property, after the original owner, the Abbot of Abingdon, was hanged at the Reforma- tion, and served as a hunting ground for Henry VIII‘s new Palace of Whitehall.


Here hunting cries of ‗So-Ho!‘ echoed around the grassy slopes from Tyburn way (as Oxford Street was called) down to Whitehall and the Thames – and the name of the area was born. But grassy slopes were not destined to stay grassy for long, as property developers (a permanent part of London life since Roman times) began eying up the area for development, encouraged by the fact that the Stuart kings, perennially hard up for cash, decided to sell off their hunting grounds.


The first thing that developers have to do is to convince would-be purchasers that by living in a new area they are going ‗up market‘. So the nobil- ity were enticed in, firstly the Earl of Leicester in the 1630‘s, then, after a short interlude caused by the Civil War, the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Carlisle and the Duke of Fauconberg, all together in a natty new development called Soho Square. That did it, and between the 1670‘s and the 1730‘s the whole of present day Soho was laid out by property speculators in a gridiron pattern of streets for the well to do.


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