Soho and the West End After Dark

The busiest square mile in London after dark and the one people most often pick for the wrong reasons. Soho is excellent for a great many things. Almost none of them involve wanting to be unobserved.

What Soho is now

Restaurants, theatres, bars and a permanent crowd, from about six until well past midnight, seven nights a week. The old trade has largely gone, as our post on where London’s red light district went sets out, and what replaced it is hospitality at very high density.

That density is the whole character. Streets narrow enough that you are always near somebody, tables close enough that you can hear the next conversation, and a reasonable chance of walking into somebody you know. For a night out that is the appeal. For anything else it is the problem.

The one thing to be careful about

Clip joints. The one part of old Soho that never quite died, and the pattern has not changed since the sixties.

Somebody approaches you on the street, mentions a bar or a club nearby, and walks you to a doorway. Inside there is a drink, a hostess, and then a bill for several hundred pounds with two men standing near the exit. It is not a misunderstanding, it is the business model.

The rule is simple: nobody legitimate in London finds their customers by approaching them on a pavement. If you are stopped on the street in the West End, that is what is happening. Our guide on spotting a fake listing covers the same instinct applied online.

Covent Garden and the theatre end

Handier than Soho and slightly calmer. If your evening involves a theatre, this is where it starts and ends, and the restaurants around the piazza are used to feeding people against a curtain time.

Two practical notes. Tell the restaurant you have a show and they will pace it. And a booking arranged for after the curtain comes down needs to allow for the twenty minutes it takes to get out of the area, because everybody else is leaving at once. Piccadilly Circus is the nearest area we cover and a short walk from most of the theatres.

The northern edge

Where the West End turns into something quieter. Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus are transport rather than destinations: excellent for getting somewhere, thin for spending an evening.

Walk five minutes north from Oxford Street, though, and you are in Fitzrovia, which is a different world and one of the more pleasant places in central London to eat.

Where the bookings actually happen

Not in Soho. There are very few incall flats in the West End and the reason is the same as everywhere else: what a lease costs and how many people are on the street.

In practice a West End evening ends somewhere else. Ten minutes west and you are in Marylebone or Mayfair; a few minutes north and you are in Fitzrovia. If you are staying in a West End hotel, an outcall works perfectly well and the lobbies are busy enough that nobody notices anybody. See incall or outcall.

Getting out at the end

The hardest part of a West End evening. Cabs at half past eleven on a Friday are close to theoretical, the one way system defeats the apps, and everybody is trying at once.

Walk to a main road. Regent Street, Charing Cross Road or Piccadilly, and the problem solves itself in two minutes. On Friday and Saturday the Night Tube runs, and from Tottenham Court Road the Central line will have you in Bayswater faster than anything with wheels. Our post on getting around late at night has the detail.

The short version

Soho for dinner and a drink with somebody, gladly. Soho for the quiet part of the evening, no. Eat here, and arrange the rest of it ten minutes away.

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