Where London’s Red Light District Went

People arrive in London expecting an equivalent of De Wallen or the Reeperbahn, spend an evening looking for it, and go home puzzled. There isn’t one. There hasn’t been for decades, and the reason is more interesting than the absence.

There was one, and it was Soho

For most of the twentieth century Soho did the job. Walker’s Court, Brewer Street, the streets around Berwick Street: clip joints, walk ups, neon, and a doorway economy that everybody in London knew about and nobody wrote down.

The walk up is the part worth understanding, because it is the only version that survives. A narrow door beside a shop, a handwritten card, a flat one or two floors above. One woman working, and a maid downstairs. That arrangement was never quite legal and never quite prosecuted, and a handful still operate.

What actually cleared it

Not a single law and not a campaign. Three things at once, over about thirty years.

Property prices. The most boring answer and the largest one. Soho went from cheap and disreputable to some of the most expensive commercial floorspace in Europe. A walk up cannot outbid a media company for a lease.

Licensing. Westminster spent the eighties and nineties squeezing the sex shops and clip joints through licensing rather than the criminal law, which worked far better than raids ever had.

The internet. By the time the leases ran out the doorway was obsolete anyway. Nobody needs a lit street to find anybody now.

Walker’s Court still exists. It has a theatre in it.

Why no new one appeared

This is the part that surprises people, and it comes down to one line of law.

In England and Wales a premises used by more than one person for prostitution is a brothel. That is the whole test. No sign is needed, no manager, nobody profiting, and the two people do not even have to be there on the same day.

A red light district is, definitionally, a lot of people working in close proximity. The law makes the concentration itself the offence, while leaving the individual entirely lawful. So the trade did not go away, it dispersed: one person per address, spread across the city. Our guide on what counts as a brothel sets the law out properly, and the legal position covers the rest.

Where it went instead

Into flats, and into hotels. The map of London now follows transport and housing stock rather than any historic quarter.

The incall clusters are where you would expect if you think about it for a minute: mansion blocks and porter buildings within a short walk of a tube. Paddington, Bayswater, Earls Court, Marylebone. Anonymous entrances, lots of coming and going, nobody remarking on anybody.

The outcall map is simply the hotel map. Mayfair, Knightsbridge, the streets off Park Lane.

What this means if you are looking

Practically: there is nowhere to walk to, and the places that advertise themselves as though there were are worth avoiding.

The clip joint is the one part of old Soho that never quite died. The pattern is unchanged since the sixties: someone on the street, a promise of a bar, a bill for several hundred pounds and two men by the door. If you are approached on the street in the West End, that is what it is.

The rest is arranged in advance, at a stated price, with a name and photographs attached. That is not a modern compromise; it is a straightforwardly better arrangement than the one it replaced. Our guide on spotting a fake listing covers how to check that what you are looking at is real.

A small footnote

Every so often somebody proposes a managed zone for London, usually pointing at Leeds, which ran one for several years. It has never got anywhere here and probably will not: the law would need changing, and no London borough wants to be the one that volunteers.

So the answer to where the red light district went is that it was priced out, licensed out, and then made unnecessary. What replaced it is ninety four people working alone across forty five areas, which is harder to photograph and considerably easier to deal with.

See which part of London suits which evening, or ring +44 20 7846 3480.