View from Soho – Associated.com

I grew up in a flat behind Liberty 's in Regent Street , where my mother kept chickens on the roof in the days of rationing. Chickens can be suicidal, as a sorrowing friend with hens and a swimming pool once told me, but my mother's merely clucked, to the bewilderment of people on the pavement below, and occasionally laid eggs. The flat had a roomy kitchen, and masses of space.

When I was old enough to take ballet lessons I would do my barre exercises against the huge, built-in Welsh dresser, and go to classes in one or other of the rehearsal rooms and studios that lined the upper storeys along Shaftesbury Avenue . Like all little girls, I dreamed with each step, and I'd climb to our roof to dance to the entrancing music that floated across Kingly Street from Liberty's, in the dark winter nights when the store held its staff Christmas parties. Only when the glowing back windows of the store began filling with watchers would I bolt down to the safety of our flat, too shy to dance for strangers because I wasn't good enough. Years later I went to watch a friend sweating through a dance class in one of the rooms where I'd been taught as a child, and got talking to a very pretty, totally untalented girl afterwards. I've only been dancing six weeks, she said happily, and I've already got a job! Where? I gaped at her. In panto, she said. In Beirut .

Not everybody who comes to Soho , whether for work or play, is that naïve, but the fascinating thing about the area is its diversity: there is something of interest here for everyone. My passion is for books and their authors and there's an entire block of 'sixties offices and flats in Marshall Street named for William Blake, a one-time resident. But what I've always loved far more is the discreet green plaque on a graceful facade in Great Pulteney Street . The Georgian houses here have been restored, and the plaque commemorates the name of John William Polidori. 1795 to 1821, it reads. Born and died here. Author of The Vampyre. Obscure, you think? But reading his name conjures up for me the extraordinary, scandalous group who spent a holiday in Switzerland in the nineteenth century, and included the author of one of the most famous horror stories ever written. Polidori was the least known, but he was there. There, accompanying Byron, picking fights with Shelley, there when they were confined to a villa by bad weather and Byron challenged everyone to write a ghost story. Polodori did indeed write The Vampyre as a result, but how many of us know that? (It's not a patch on Bram Stoker's later Dracula.) And could any of the men have guessed that it would be Mary Shelley who, inspired on that evening, went on to win not only the game invented so idly, but won immortality with it, when she wrote Frankenstein?

I've spent a lot of time in Switzerland , and I know exactly what it's like to be housebound by torrential rain, thunder that rolls around peaks and lightning that bounces from mountain to mountain till you're sure you can't avoid being struck. No wonder the plot turns so much on electricity. What does surprise me is that well over a hundred years after the publication of that novel, many of the houses in our area still had only gas for light, and coal or anthracite for heat. Electricity as a domestic service came as late to some parts of Soho as though we were not in central London but on some remote island in the North Sea.

© Alida Baxter

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