London Walks -Soho
After a break of some 5 months the London Walks Group recently embarked on a Soho Saunter. With almost 80 u3a members divided between 3 Guides, we started outside Wyndham’s Theatre on Charing Cross Road and ended some 2 hours later at the rear of the London Palladium.
En route, we passed through Leicester Square, China Town, and saw the pub that was the centre of Dutch resistance during the war. Into Soho Square, with its House of Charity members club, Hospital for Women and the statue of King Charles II complete with a bunch of flowers.
On past Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club with the famous Little Italy Restaurant opposite and through a much more respectable Soho, no longer the den of iniquity it once was.
We paused outside the Windmill Theatre to be told that the display of nudity was not obscene, provided the models stood in a motionless pose. Also their famous motto ‘We never closed’ was not strictly true, as they had to comply with the compulsory closure that affected all theatres in 1939, but were however, the first to reopen.
Finally we approached the end of our walk through Carnaby Street, now pedestrianised and a shadow of how it was in the swinging sixties.