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Hi folks, welcome Dan Snow's History Hit.

If you're in central London and you walk down the streets of Soho,

you will see theatres, you'll see pretty petisories and cafes

and restaurants having cuisine from all over the world, from the Asian eateries of Chinatown

to London's oldest French restaurant set in a beautiful Georgian townhouse. But that famous area

is also now home to luxury apartments with eye-watering rents and the offices of

tech startups and co-working spaces. It's all really a very, very far cry from the

establishments that made Soho world famous in the 1920s. Though what I love about Soho,

if you look down the side streets, you can still

see traces of it. Namely, those adult shops and those old pubs that were previously

gentlemen's bars. Soho was once London's, if not Europe's most notorious neighbourhood,

a thriving melting pot of speakeasies and sex work and organised crime.

From the Razor Gangs, the 1920s, the pre-war pimps and money laundering shop fronts,

the area has always been, and some say still is a little bit, a hotbed for thieves,

conmen, drug dealers and shady goings on. But it's also been an exciting place, a place for art

and culture, fertile ground for revolution, groundbreaking jazz, rock and roll, counter-cultural

movement. It's been a safe place for the LGBTQ plus movement to flourish.

I want to do an episode on Soho because we're all talking about at the moment.

Historic Soho has been brought to life in a new BBC TV show called Dope Girls.

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