“I’m trying to prove you can still have a great night out in Soho,” I say. “You can. But not a late one,” replies Lesley Lewis over a glass of white wine at her beloved pub the French House. “I’ve always loved Soho,” says the legendary proprietor, who has run the French House for 37 years. “I will love it until the day I die, and I don’t intend to leave. To me it’s a special, magical paradise. Back in the day everywhere used to be open till 3am. Now, it’s more… restricted.” 

At 71, her nights may not run so late these days, but she wants Soho to remain a place where people can come together and party until dawn. And she knows a thing or two about the Soho community. Her pub, a Soho mainstay since 1891 and once the haunt of legends like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, was kept alive during Covid by a crowdfunding campaign initiated by locals who couldn’t bear to see it shut. 

Can you party after 1am in Soho?

Today she says Soho’s late-night culture is being erased. People can still go out in Camden, she says with a roll of her eyes, but it’s getting harder and harder to keel onto the streets of Soho past midnight like Mick Jagger used to. “We need to open the clubs! Let people enjoy themselves. Let people dance!”   

Despite her concerns, I’m determined to prove that the birthplace of Cool Britannia is alive and kicking. That’s how I found myself at the Hippodrome Casino at 4.30am nursing a Diet Coke and an incoming headache, trying to remember everything that led to me sitting beside a man who’s fallen asleep at a slot machine. 

•••

My plan was simple – to embrace the best part of Soho: the people. At each bar, I’d ask someone where I should go next, and see where it took me.  

“In Soho, you’ll chat to people you wouldn’t normally,” says Eva, a bartender at the French House who says she’s ended up on wild nights out with people who came to the bar alone. There’s just something about the compressed energy of Soho that gets people chatting, she says. 

In fact, people are chatting so much at the French House that it’s making it hard to hear my friends – so much for Soho being ‘too quiet’. I turn to two other bartenders, both nursing red wines after their shifts, and ask them where I should go. 

They suggest Trisha’s down the street, so I turn on my heels (yes, it’s a heels kind of night) and head to my favourite red carpet: the one that leads down unassuming stairs to a bar that looks like it could play a pivotal role in The Godfather. 

‘It’s madness because it’s Trishas’

I weave past the gingham tablecloths on the small round tables and a giant picture of the eponymous Trisha and make my way towards the smoking section. Here I get chatting with Imran, who’s been behind the bar for six years. “Sometimes we get a lot of nutcases in here, like him,” he says, pointing to a regular standing beside us. “It’s madness… because it’s Trisha’s. I can’t say why it’s madness.”

Imran says there are too many chains coming into Soho, which are ruining its individuality. He worries that places like Trisha’s are dying out. When I ask him for Trisha’s lore he asks “are you still recording?” before shaking his head. For my next stop, someone at the bar recommends I check out a place called The Pink Flamingo on Brewer Street, so I head out into the night. Behind the bar at the Flamingo, Dave has a similar tale of woe. He says his bar, which is attached to the El Camion restaurant upstairs, used to be the moneymaker of the two, but now it’s flipped. People want to go out to eat rather than dance all night in a basement. 

He said the place used to be filled with students until 3am, but now fewer young people are taking their turn on the dance floor. I suggest the £14 drinks might have something to do with it but he says that’s the price of keeping a venue open in central London. It’s a never-ending cycle of rising prices and declining patrons. 

As someone who remembers the days when you could sneak into Soho bars with little more than a fake ID and a smile, I feel ancient in this student-heavy crowd, so I head to my next destination: Udderbelly. This is one of my favourite underrated Soho locations. You don’t need to go to the attached theatre to gain access to its affordable espresso martinis and watch a show on the mini stage, where on Saturday a drag queen was belting out her best Celine Dion impression. 

It wouldn’t be a trip to Soho without a minor celebrity encounter, and I spot Bridgerton star Luke Thompson. Buoyed by the confidence of three espresso martinis, I told him I was writing a story on Soho nightlife, and asked if he had any spots he’d recommend. He did not.

The Box is a legacy of debauched Soho

The bartender did, though: he said we should go to Raincall. I’m making my way there when my phone chirrups. Earlier in the day I’d messaged a guy who knows a guy. Now confirmation has come through: I’m on the coveted guest list for The Box.

The Box, for the uninitiated, is the infamous night club between Shaftesbury Avenue and Brewer Street that promises to keep alive the tawdry side of Soho. It’s extremely exclusive, only accessible to women with good contacts and men with deep pockets. It’s the kind of place where you have to look a certain way, wear a certain outfit, and speak a certain language to get through the doors, which feels a little removed from the free-spirited foundations of Soho’s nightlife of yore. 

The Box is as filthy as it’s always been: it’s notorious for its hourly stage shows where you can see everything from a ‘doctor’ giving a ‘patient’ a transplant by pulling a heart out of their behind, to someone shooting ping pong balls across the room using only the power of their vagina. It is a little frustrating that this is the only place in Soho open until 4am (and its licence to sell booze ends at 3am). 

Don’t get me wrong, however: I still get a thrill from dancing on tables and being handed glass after glass of free Dom Perignon. You can party until the small hours in Soho, provided you have the right connections…

In Soho, a tension is brewing

While Soho feels like a congenial place when you’re sharing cigarettes and enjoying half-remembered conversations with strangers, in the broad light of day tension is brewing. 

According to the Home Office, only 16 out of 41 licence applications were granted in the West End between 2023-24, and applications for new pubs and wine bars fell by 80 per cent between 2022-24. 

I meet Westminster council’s deputy leader Tim Barnes, the Conservative councillor for Soho, for a coffee at – where else? – Bar Italia on Frith Street. He disputes the idea that there’s no night life in Soho. “It just isn’t true… you’ve got plenty of pubs and bars, depending on what night of the week it is, that are open until 1am.” 

But this isn’t about 1am, I say, this is about 3am and beyond. Soho was once the centre of the most vital cultural capital in the world. Today there’s hardly anywhere to party until dawn. A case in point: one of my favourite spots, Helen of Troy, used to be open past 3am in the 1970s but now has a hard kick-out time of 2am.

Barnes says it’s not that people are looking for late-night activities and can’t find them: it’s that fewer people are going out late to begin with. They are drinking less, he says, and there’s a lack of late-night transport. But this doesn’t quite wash: the underground runs 24 hours a day over the weekend and there are plenty of warehouse venues across London that are far less accessible than Soho. If people can get back from Venue MOT in Surrey Quays at 4.30 in the morning, surely they can get back from Dean Street?

The lack of late venues isn’t a London problem – it’s a Soho problem. I go out in Dalston most weekends and you can roll out of a basement at 3am straight into a kebab shop that’s more rammed than the club. The same goes for Peckham, Brixton, Hackney Wick… 

‘Fewer places open late than ever’

But in Soho, there are fewer places than ever that are open late – I should know, I just stayed out all night trying to find them. After leaving The Box, I asked around to see what my options were. “Not much,” was the consensus. “You could try the casino,” hazarded one staff member, who I’m sure just wanted rid of me. That’s how I ended up in a windowless room sitting beside a man slumped across a one-armed bandit.

Surely some of the blame must lie at the hands of Barnes and his peers, especially in light of their much-lampooned stance against what they called “vertical drinking” – standing up, to you and I – which could further exacerbate Soho’s lack of late night options. Barnes counters that the police are often responsible for licences being rejected, not the council. But when I spoke to the Met they said they only offer advice – local authorities make all the decisions. Nobody wants to shoulder the blame.

Barnes is undeterred: “When you say, ‘What’s Soho about now’, I think it’s going back to being on the frontline of culture. It hasn’t really known what [it was] for the last 20 years. Now places [like Trisha’s] have swung around from being old and out of date to being kitsch to being something of their own. The circular nature of sh*t has kicked back in… There’s more culture and music and art, there’s a whole massive explosion of that which is so f*cking brilliant.” 

What’s f*cking brilliant is being in The Box and seeing a fully naked woman whipping a whisky sour around with her plait, or meeting a lady in her fifties in the bathroom who has been going there her whole life and has no plans to stop, or running across Shaftesbury Avenue at four in the morning with a man I met outside a closed Bar Italia who calls himself “The King of the Road.”  

What’s not so f*cking brilliant is that, while there are places to go in Soho past 1am, you either have to know a guy or have near-unlimited funds. Places like The Box and Soho’s myriad members’ clubs are doing just fine, but nightlife here has always been built off of queer, audacious events that were welcoming to anyone freaky enough to give them a go. Now they’re hidden behind layers of social privilege and wealth. 

That’s why I take going out so seriously. Every tequila shot taken in a sticky Soho basement is a socio-cultural choice. There are plenty of quiet areas of London. Soho should not be one of them. In the words of Lewis: “Let’s just dance. It’s all we want to do.”