Peter McGovern
British Literature
Miriam Kroeker
March 19, 2010

Soho Paper Soho has changed much throughout time from the Victorian time to modern days. It has had its problems such a cholera or racial issues, as well as social reform in the founding of its police force and the founding for China Town in 1985 by the Duke of Gloucester. It has also maintained a rich tradition in dining and drinking which has acquired its own rich history along the way. During the reign of Queen Victoria the population of England doubled due to Industrial Revolution witch also put new pressures on her society. This caused the crime rate to increase. Seeing the need to reform the police force of England, the Home Secretary Robert Pell developed what was a crude but partially effective police force. He formed ‘The Metropolitan Police Force’, and two men he put in charge of the force of 1000 men, were Charles Rown and Richard Mayne. All London’s police were the responsibility of one authority, under the direction of the Home Secretary, with headquarters at Scotland Yard. At the time their duty was not only crime prevention but inherited many of the watchmen’s duties, consisting of lighting lamps, calling out time, watching for fires, and providing other public services. “Bobbies or Peelers were not immediately popular. Most citizens viewed constables as an infringement on English social and political life, and people often jeered the police”(McDonnell). In much of the pseudo-scientific literature of the day the Irish were held to be inferior, an example of a lower evolutionary form, closer to the apes then their “superiors”, the Anglo- Saxons. John Beddoe wrote in his “Races of Britain” that all men of genius were orthognathous (less prominent jaw bones), while the Irish and Welsh were prognathous and that the Celt was closely related to Cromagnon man, who, in turn, was linked, according to Beddoe, to the “Africanoid”. The rapid increase in Irish immigration is often argued was the chief cause for the growth of anti-Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century England. Patrick Joyce and Neville Kirk both believe that ethnic tension and violence in southeast increased during and after the late 1840s, that increase followed the pattern of the arrival and dispersal of Irish immigrants, and that the controversy over the creation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 intensified the conflict (Victorian web). In such living conditions disease was inevitable, but Victorian London’s experience of cholera in 1832 would have a huge social impact. Spread via the bacteria-laced diarrhea of its victims, cholera’s violent and rapid assault on the human body was terrifying. Although it killed fewer then other contemporary diseases such as influenza or tuberculosis, it was cholera that provided a deadly backdrop to this era of social and economic upheaval. There was no known cure at the time, although plenty were offered by your local quacks. Driven by a combination of genuine concern for the poor and self-preservation by the elite, the fear of cholera became a crucial element in the development of public health in Britain. It inspired some of the first investigations into the living conditions endured by much of the population. In the wake of the cholera epidemic, leading social reformer Edwin Chadwick was commissioned to inquire into the state of public sanitation. His report, The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population (1842), made a clear link between disease and living conditions and he called for urgent action. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dr John Snow was no miasmatist. He publicly stated in 1849 that cholera was transmitted through water. This time, a single domestic sewer pipe contaminated a single water supply, the Broad Street pump. As a result, hundreds of local people were rapidly poisoned after visiting the well, or from eating or drinking the products made using its waters. The moral of this is don’t drink poop water.
(sciencemuseum)
London’s Chinatown is located in Soho. “Opened by the Duke of Gloucester on October 29, 1985”. You enter Chinatown as you pass the oriental barrier at the Wardour Street end of Gerrard Street. At once, your nostrils are assailed by the smell of Chinese spices. The air seems full of monosodium glutamate. The reason why 90% of visitors come to Chinatown is to eat. There are dozens and dozens of restaurants, spilling out of Chinatown proper into Lisle Street, Leicester Square and Upper St Martin’s Lane. Steam writhes out of the kitchens with the promise of dim sum. Glazed ducks shine in the windows, some with crispy heads and beaks still attached. Menus outside promise all the Chinese dishes you’ve ever tried and a great many you probably haven’t. A word of warning though, beware of parking a car in Chinatown late at night. It’s a perfectly safe part of London, but the barriers are locked at midnight and not opened again until 6:30 the next morning. You could therefore, find yourself having to walk home with a stomach full of eel with garlic and chilli, suckling pig, spare ribs and deep-fried wan ton. It’s not possible to list all the good pubs in the West End, but I can start with De Hers on Macclesfield Street. “It was named after the Dutch sailor who ran it in the 1920s and was a meeting place for the Dutch Resistance in the Second World War”. It’s one of the best buildings in Soho, with ground-floor windows that open out to embrace the street on warm days and nights. Nearby is French House, the local for members of the Free French in the 1940s. It’s a friendly place, frequented by boozy celebrities, carrying on a tradition that was forged by the likes of Brendan Behan, Jeffrey Bernard and Dylan Tomas. The Marquis of Granby in Chandos Place is a wonderful pub, quite cool and dark. Claude Duval, a notorious 18th century highwayman was captured by the Bow Street Runners in this pub, and legend has it that Ian Fleming was drinking here when he thought of the code name 007 for James Bond. At one time Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Wine Office Court, off Fleet Street, was the most famous pub in London. It’s a remarkably well-preserved 17th-century chophouse, a rambling old pub with small, cozy rooms and sawdust-covered floors. The whole place still creaks atmospherically, through the building was underpinned in 1990. It reeks of the London of Dickens, it was mentioned in A Tale of Two Cities. London’s reputation as a culinary inferno was gradually dispelled during the 1980s when large restaurants catering every kind of food became fashionable. “Now the London customer could choose between monkfish tempura and chilli breast of chicken with coconut rice, grilled rabbit with polenta and braised octopus with chickpeas and coriander”. Many of these restaurants soon became flourishing commercial enterprises; their chefs were recognized and controversial London figures, their owners part of a chic world of art and society. In the 1990s the connection between food and commerce was rendered all the more distinctive by the floating of certain restaurants on the Stock Exchange, large companies have bought others as a profitable form of speculation. Some of the more recently established restaurants are very large indeed, and the fact that few tables remain unbooked is testimony to the permanent and characteristic voracity of Londoners. That is why it has always been known as the city of markets (Peter Ackroyd). The London district of Soho has gone through many changes. Yet through these changes whether for good or bad it has managed to hang on to a rich history. It is today a popular place for tourists to travel to that are visiting London and seems to be starting to reform for the better.