Berwick Street, London

The red and the black

The multiple name sign in my previous post reminded me of this conjunction of old and newish in Soho. I mostly associate street names made of individual ceramic tile letters with Hampstead (London NW3), although they also appear in other places, including Ilfracombe, I believe. In NW3 they go back well into the Victorian period, and help create the pleasing coherence of the street design in that part of North London.

In my picture, however, similar letters were used in Berwick Street, Soho, and now they are a little the worse for wear. What to do, when two letters fall off and no replacements can be found? Resisting the idea of renaming the street Erwic Street and being done with it, the solution seems to have been to install one of the City of Westminster's more recent sign designs. These enamelled steel plates are now ubiquitous in Central London and so familiar that the overused word iconic might be applied to them by the unwary. The design was produced in around 1968 by Chris Tinings (and/or Misha Black: sources vary) of the consultancy Design Research Unit. The lettering is in Univers Bold Condensed with a careful use of red and black to make the information really clear.

So while the standard metal sign tells us where we are, the remains of the old tiled sign remind us how we might once have found our way around. Once more, graphic clutter reveals a bit of the past.

Moor Street, London

Soho has always been a small world apart from the West End. Home to successive generations of outsiders – Huguenots, Italians, Chinese – its small houses and shops contrasted with the luxuries of Piccadilly and the commercial go-getting of Oxford Street, the thoroughfares that mark the boundaries of Soho to the west and north. In the 20th century the area was known for a heady mix of film companies and restaurants (some patronized by West End theatre people and bohemians from nearby Fitzrovia), plus London’s dark side – brothels, lap-dancing clubs, gambling dens, protectioneers, drug-dealers.

There’s not so much of the old Soho left now. There’s the odd Greek restaurant, all formica and cheapo ouzo, the occasional old-fashioned barber, a sex shop or two. There are also the cherished and precarious survivors – Maison Bertaux with its pastries and rickety stairs, the bohemian Colony Club in a building that seems so fragile it might be held up by the thick green paint on the walls. Mostly, though, the lights are brighter and the businesses less seamy or steamy than they were.

One area where the dodgy Soho clung on was the bit known to the police as the Moor Street Triangle, bounded by Old Compton Street, Charing Cross Road, and Moor Street itself. Fronted by restaurants, a hairdresser’s, a taxi office, and defined at its corners by a diner, a pub, and a bookshop, this enclave also sheltered drug-dealing, a lap-dancing club, and the kind of rooms you hired by the hour. The properties in the triangle had been unofficially converted and adapted – extra ceiling height for the lap dancing, lower ceilings for the more horizontal activities above, lean-tos in the courtyard to provide extra kitchen space for the restaurants, interconnecting corridors allowing those in the know to enter from Moor Street and exit via Old Compton.

The triangle is being redeveloped now. Gone are the jerry-built additions; gone the low-ceilinged bedrooms; gone the tawdry shop fronts. Out have come the detritus of sex slavery and cheap restaurant food, together with the desiccated python, star of an exotic dancing act, that escaped and lurked in the yard, living off kitchen scraps. The Soho-Georgian parts of the facades are preserved or replaced with finishes that are in keeping with what’s already there, and the corner buildings – diner, bookshop, and pub – remain as they were. It’s a neat scheme, which looks as if it will resist the temptation to sanitize completely this knockabout corner of London. But no doubt the shady businesses that once traded here have set up shop elsewhere.

Hollen Street, London

High above Hollen Street, in one of Soho’s unregarded corners, a group of putti are making music. It seems a strange decoration for this otherwise industrial-looking building in a Soho side street. But this plaque, and another up the street that depicts putti churning out pages on a printing press, are a clue to the building’s origins. This was the printing works of the music publishers Novello’s, just around the corner from their offices (now Chappell’s) in Wardour Street.

Both these buildings were designed by Frank L Pearson, who was the son-in-law of the company chairman and the obvious choice for the job. The printing works came first, in 1898, and were followed in 1906 by the offices, all in brick with stone dressings. The office building has a beautiful small concert room on the first floor, done out in the style of a 17th-century hall – the kind of oak-panelled room you find in a country house or Oxbridge college of the Commonwealth period or just after. It’s not normally open, but can be glimpsed, often lit up, from the comfort of the pub opposite in Wardour Street. Among the neon-lit media offices and restaurants of Soho, the concert hall and the charmingly decorated printing works form a throw-back to another time.