Soho in the early 1980s was very different from the throbbing metropolitan hub we know today. Back then it was still sleazy, disreputable and not a fit place for a lone 28-year-old woman to wander on her own after dark, unless she wanted to get propositioned by scumbags. So naturally I wandered it, repeatedly.

There were some decent pubs and a bunch of screening rooms where film critics hung out, it’s true, but instead of streets full of drunk tourists stylish brasseries and boutiques selling upmarket lingerie, most of the area was a warren of topless bars, peep shows, clip joints and prostitutes, with a lot of the businesses rumoured to have been run by porn magnates, gangsters and/or shady foreign concerns.

At this point in my life, I was desperately trying to find work as a photographer or writer, so conceived the slightly demented idea of visiting as many types of sex-related businesses as I could, and then writing about them. This I proceeded to do, in a spirit both naive and fearless, meeting with a lot of bemusement, a certain amount of suspicion but, fortunately for me, hardly any hostility or aggression – I didn’t exactly look like an undercover policewoman, but it’s possible they might have thought I was one.

The results are, I think, quite interesting – an impression of a vanished world. The following article was published in a short-lived men’s magazine called Boy Zone (no relation to the band) which went bust shortly afterwards, owing a lot of people (including me) a great deal of money.

Peep shows and nude encounters have now been replaced by lapdancing clubs, but you no longer have to go to Soho to find them. A token amount of smut can be found there to this day – but it’s nothing like it used to be. Hardcore sex films, of course, can now be rented or bought or downloaded and watched in the privacy of your own home, if you haven’t got anything better to do.

[Currency note: according to MeasuringWorth.com, one pound sterling in 1983 would be worth anything from £2.63 to £4.75 in 2012.]

ANNE BILLSON’S SOHO WALKABOUT

As the sun sinks slowly into Mayfair and the stars come out over Centre Point, the funster’s thoughts turn inexorably towards the bright lights and rundown neon of that square half-mile known as Soho, sin city nestling like a soiled Kleenex in the bosom of our great metropolis. We all know that there’s plenty of entertaining things for you chaps to get up to there, but what about we girls? With this in mind, I took a deep breath and plunged into the male-orientated maelstrom.

THE HARDCORE SEX FILM

It’s £3.50 for a three and a half hour programme. Good value a go-go, but I last only 20 minutes: this is strictly for the avant-garde film fan. It subverts all the conventions of normal cinematic technique in its pioneering use of disorientating continuity, fuzzy focus and flash-cut editing, and dispenses altogether with such traditional movie mainstays such as plot, characterisation and credits.

There’s a daring use of naturalistic sound (trucks going past in the background) coupled with constant light muzak; and the primeval Quest For Fire grunting is augmented by English dialogue rendered inaudible by the excruciating quality of an out-of-synch soundtrack. The cinema is packed with a clientèle of discreetly wheezing, rustling city gent types clutching briefcases over their laps.

The friendly Glaswegian ticket-collector thinks the films are all rubbish and prefers Mick Jagger in Performance. His co-worker mutters that the stuff they’re showing here is peanuts – not what he’d call hardcore at all. I realise with a jolt that I ain’t seen nothing yet. Could there possibly be anything even more boring?

THE TOPLESS BAR AND STRIPTEASE

I pay £2 and get taken out of the box office into the street, around the corner and down some stairs into a dingy sort of dive, where there are a lot of men in spectacles and a party of Japanese all staring at an empty chair in time to thudding disco music. I put my own spectacles on and immediately feel at home. There seems to be only one genuinely topless girl at the bar; the others are all hanging out of varieties of chemise.

The tariff is extraordinary: from £4 for a soft drink, through £8 for a glass of wine, culminating in a staggering £85 for something called “Schloss Boosenburg”. I settle for a half-pint of “Warlek” lager. “Is it non-alcoholic?” I ask cannily, having read about these things.

“Yes.” They point impatiently to the illegible hieroglyphic alongside each item. The topless girl insists I sit down, and follows me with my drink to the table. “That’ll be £4 plus £1 service charge.”

One bespectacled gentleman causes a rumpus and leaves in such a huff that he knocks over three chairs, one topless waitress, and, almost, me and my Warlek. They’d been pressing him to buy a drink and he wouldn’t. “It comes out of our wages – that’s why we get a bit stroppy.”

The beat goes on. The Japanese go home. Some of the spectacles go home. When does the show start? “Any minute now.”

Forty minutes later two of the girls saunter over to the empty chair on the “stage”. One of them draws the curtains to and fro, while the other strikes inanimate attitudes in progressive states of undress. But where is the Bump n Grind, eh? I thought this sort of thing went out with The Windmill. The artiste is an undeniably good poseur, but I was expecting a bit more music and movement for my money.

“Everybody out! Two pounds one show only!”

“Did you enjoy the show?” they ask me.

“Um,” I reply, “It was very… artistic. But the curtain was a bit noisy.”

(Yells) “Hear that? Put some oil on the curtain!”

“Were you bored?’ I ask the artiste. “You looked very bored.”

She says nothing and just looks more bored than ever, so I exit in search of a real drink.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIO

There are two naked models hanging around, one black and one white. I’m asked to choose, and immediately suffer fits of paranoia that whichever one I don’t go for will be mortally offended and/or think I’m racist. Eventually I opt for the nearer of the two. She’s black and her name is Sherry.

The studio consists of a couch draped in degrees of lurid puce and lit by two photographic lamps. I get out my Olympus and sink to my knees in time-honoured Blow-Up fashion. “Don’t sit on the floor,” she says. “The carpet’s wet.”

I leap to my feet, thinking of my right knee and its rheumatic tendencies. Why is the carpet wet? One doesn’t like to ask.

Sherry launches into her routine, changing her pose with each click of the shutter. Elbows up. Tits out. Smile etc. She tells me (not without a little discreet prodding on my part) that the male photographers usually want continental poses. Continental? You mean like Brigitte Bardot? Pouting sex kitten? No. Legs apart. I get the drift, but prefer to approximate a Sun Page 3.

What kind of lenses do they usually have? Zoom? Telephoto? (You can see I’m thinking Freud.) No, says Sherry, ordinary ones like mine. She gets a bit embarrassed when they have to go in close to fill the frame. Otherwise, she says, it’s not too bad. There’s no funny stuff allowed. Occasionally some of them pop back to give her prints. (Aha, so there was film in the camera.) She’s never posed for nudie mags. Really, Sherry wants to be a fashion model, but just doesn’t have the right contacts or portfolio.

Verdict: possibly the most fun a bona fide photographer can have in Soho for £7.50 (£9 if you have to borrow one of their cameras).

THE GAY VIDEO PARLOUR

He: “You can’t go in there, love. It’s men only.”

Me: (vehemently) “But I’m gay.”

He: (shaking head) “Sorry love.”

Later, I am assured by a habituee that this is not so much discrimination as a solicitous regard for my finer feelings. The videos, I’m told, come a poor second in entertainment value to the spontaneous floor show that is forever going on in the audience.

THE NUDE ENCOUNTER

“What! you mean you want to go in and look at a nude woman? You’re not one of those, are you ?”

Me: (vehemently) “No!”

The price scale goes from £8 for a 10 minute encounter up to £25 for a whopping one hour. The girl leads me downstairs, where we go into adjoining cubby-holes linked by a large curved window. I sink into my comfortable chair. She takes her clothes off and sinks into hers. I wonder whether I should take my clothes off too, but decide against it. There’s a stern notice saying that anyone who does anything too outré will instantly get chucked out on their ear.

I ask her about the customers. What do they do? Do they wank?

“Oh no.” She’s shocked at the suggestion. “They talk about their problems. They’ve all got wives or girlfriends. Some of them cry a bit. Then they go home.”

“Aha, so you’re a kind of psychoanalyst.” Freud again. Secretly I am thinking I would not do this job for ail the tea in China. Listen to men’s problems. God help us.

Sometimes she gets upset. (“I hate seeing men cry”) but on the whole it’s all pretty boring. Her boyfriend doesn’t object to her line of work, because “I don’t actually do anything, you know. I keep myself to myself.”

THE PEEP SHOW

I shut myself in the booth, but then have to reopen the door,
 because it’s so dark I can’t see where to insert my 50 pence piece. 
There’s a sort of letterbox which opens at chest-level – regular 
peepers must get appalling back-ache. What do I see? I see a naked girl dancing around in front of a mirror. She appears to be hav
ing a good time. She’s mouthing along to the words of the record. 
She doesn’t play with herself, and she doesn’t “squeegee” the win
dow as described in Duffy, the thriller by Dan Kavanagh (“The 
most realistic picture of the sordid life that is Soho you are likely 
to read” – Police World.)

Verdict: not good value for the discerning girl, who can probably get a better show for free in front of her bathroom mirror.

THE SEX SHOP

At first I think I’ve wandered into the London Dungeon by mistake; the walls are lined with severed phalluses, fingers, hands of Glory and disembodied heads with wide-open mouths pressed up against perspex packaging. There are also things like Invisible Booby Drops (for the Invisible Woman?) in chocolate, coconut and banana flavours. There’s underwear with bits missing. My attention is caught, however, by “Casanova’s Black Pearls”, which I’m surprised to find is not a euphemism for bollocks. “Each pearl contains the vital constituents of 25 large fresh oysters.” I fantasise about opening a genuine aphrodisiac joint on Old Compton Street serving real oysters, salted crocodile, dried salamander and the blood of bats mixed with donkey’s milk.

I have it on good advice that the rubber stockings restrict circulation and give you blue feet; but what about the rubber masks and knickers? Do they make you go blue, too? I search in vain for elbow-length black rubber gloves with which to do the washing-up. Eventually I buy a set of Sexy Doodle Transfers (“only £1.25 for a fun-filled pack of 4 sheets”). A lot of disconnected arms and legs and other, naughtier, extremities. With a little artistic ingenuity you can construct reasonable facsimiles of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

THE SAUNA AND MASSAGE

Me: (brightly) “Can I get a massage?”

She: “No dear, we only do gentlemen.”

Who do they think they are? El Vino’s?

THE MAGAZINE SHOP

It’s just like W.H. Smith & Son: the shop is full of people standing around reading the magazines. I should like to survey my surroundings, but etiquette demands I studiously avoid any possibility of eye contact, like everyone else. (Look to the mags, look to neither right nor left nor anywhere in the region of your fellow browser.) I am informed, by someone in the know, that this attitude is adopted not through delicacy, but through an infantile ostrich-like belief that it makes one invisible. These men are simply not there.

I flick through the pages of Swish! (“World’s Biggest-Selling Spanking Monthly”) and Miss Sadie Stern (“Best selling Fem-Dom Monthly”). They are both extremely silly, like Photo-Romance Teen Magazines gone mad. Jackie Jacks Off. All this stuff is unspeakably degrading to adult womanhood. It is also unspeakably degrading to adult manhood. But Adult Magazines these are not. They got stuck somewhere at the level of the Lower Fourth, witness the Bunter-like gurglings: NO-WOH-WOH-OUCH! YEEE-EEE-EEEEEK! YEE-ARRGH! SWEEEE-ISSSSH!

I toy with the concept of a TOTALLY ONOMATOPOEIC spanking story, nothing but capital letters and SFX.

CONCLUSION

There’s not an awful lot going in Soho for the average girl, unless she likes to take her clothes off. However, I’m glad to report that although I loitered days away on seedy Soho sidewalks, I was never once propositioned, molested or otherwise harassed, even while wearing my new Rouge Extreme lipstick. Then again, it might be due to the fact that I am also the Biggest Spotty Dog in the World.

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