Lesley Lewis has run the French House pub in Soho for 37 years and remains one of the neighbourhood’s most passionate defenders.
“I’ve always loved Soho,” says Lewis, whose beloved pub on Dean Street has been a Soho mainstay since 1891. “I will love it until the day I die, and I don’t intend to leave. To me it’s a special, magical paradise. Back in the day everywhere used to be open till 3am. Now, it’s more restricted.”
Lewis, 71, knows better than most what Soho represents, having kept the French House alive during Covid through a crowdfunding campaign initiated by locals who couldn’t bear to see it close.
She is clear about what is being lost, saying Soho’s late-night culture is being quietly erased while other parts of London continue to thrive past midnight.
“We need to open the clubs! Let people enjoy themselves. Let people dance!” she says, with a conviction that suggests she has been making this argument for some time.
The numbers support her concern. According to the Home Office, only 16 out of 41 licence applications were granted in the West End between 2023 and 2024, and applications for new pubs and wine bars fell by 80 per cent between 2022 and 2024.
Westminster council’s deputy leader Tim Barnes, the Conservative councillor for Soho, disputes the narrative when pressed over coffee at Bar Italia on Frith Street.
“It just isn’t true… you’ve got plenty of pubs and bars, depending on what night of the week it is, that are open until 1am,” Barnes says, though critics argue that 1am is hardly the benchmark Soho once set.
Barnes suggests that fewer people are going out late to begin with, pointing to declining alcohol consumption and a lack of late-night transport, though the underground runs 24 hours at weekends and other London districts have no such excuses.
Dalston, Peckham, Brixton, and Hackney Wick all sustain thriving late-night scenes that run well past 3am, suggesting the problem is specific to Soho rather than a citywide trend.
Bartender Imran, who has worked at Trisha’s for six years, says the creeping arrival of chain venues is eroding the individuality that made Soho magnetic in the first place. “Sometimes we get a lot of nutcases in here, like him,” he says, gesturing to a regular beside him. “It’s madness… because it’s Trisha’s. I can’t say why it’s madness.”
At The Pink Flamingo on Brewer Street, a bartender named Dave tells a similarly deflating story, noting that his bar used to be busier than the El Camion restaurant upstairs, but the dynamic has since reversed as people now prefer dining out to dancing in a basement.
Dave says the venue once filled with students until 3am, but younger crowds are thinner on the ground, and while £14 drinks may play a role, he maintains that is simply the cost of keeping a venue open in central London.
The venue that does manage to stay open until 4am is The Box, the infamous nightclub between Shaftesbury Avenue and Brewer Street, though its booze licence expires at 3am and entry requires either significant wealth or the right connections.
Barnes, for his part, remains optimistic about Soho’s cultural direction, even if the late-night picture is complicated. “When you say, ‘What’s Soho about now’, I think it’s going back to being on the frontline of culture. The circular nature of sh*t has kicked back in… there’s more culture and music and art, there’s a whole massive explosion of that which is so f*cking brilliant.”
The tension between that cultural optimism and the lived reality of trying to find somewhere to dance past midnight defines Soho’s current identity crisis, with neither the council nor the Metropolitan Police willing to shoulder responsibility for the licensing squeeze.
As Lewis puts it simply, capturing the mood of everyone who has ever stumbled happily through these streets at an unreasonable hour: “Let’s just dance. It’s all we want to do.”