‘I just don’t like change. I like it the way it was. They’ve closed Walkers Court, got rid of all the prostitutes … it’s going to become retail space. Why do people need more shops?” Caroline, in Bar Italia, is one of the many people who never went to Madame Jojo’s, mourning the end of Madame Jojo’s.  “Well, it’s iconic, isn’t it?” said Bernie Katz, a Soho icon himself, the gatekeeper of the Groucho club. He corrected his tense. “It was a landmark. It’s true, Soho is changing. It’s faster, it’s not as relaxed. But you just have to put your skates on and go with it.”  Opinion in this little grid of streets, and possibly in the world, divides squarely between neophiles and neophobes, optimists and pessimists.  “I don’t think it’s changed at all,” said Michelle Wade, proprietor of Maison Bertaux, London’s oldest and most enchanting patisserie. “In so far as, it was always changing. When my uncle was a registrar at University College Hospital, they used to race down here to have a quick dance and a drink, in the Blitz. Then, of course, there was the Dylan Thomas, Lucien Freud era …”  These are two Sohos I feel suddenly mournful not to have experienced. “Well,” she said kindly, “everyone misses a train sometimes.”  Costas, 48, is honcho of the wonderful Arts Theatre Club, open six nights a week until three in the morning, but only (mainly) to chorus girls. “The people that work in theatre, they work really hard and they play really hard, and I don’t think they make a lot of money, and they spend it all in here.”  It is unlike any other bar you will ever go to, with a very real chance that people will start singing (properly) halfway through the night. “In 10 years’ time, there will be no independents left in Soho,” he said, laying that squarely with the two main landlords, Shaftesbury and Soho Estates. “They’ve basically bought out Soho and are trying to get rid of all the little men. They prefer chains.”  Bang opposite, literally and in viewpoint, is Martin Morales, the chef at Ceviche, a cracking little Peruvian restaurant that distils the new Soho, in which food is the new sex. There must be a cultural message in this somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is.  “I think it’s amazing. It’s the centre of the universe. I am here all the time, I am here in the kitchen, I am walking the streets, looking at what is happening. I still see all the detail of the characters, people expressing themselves in unique ways. The exciting thing is chain restaurants and overly branded businesses tend to fail.”  Everyone, however, agrees on one thing: rents are ridiculous. It is frankly a miracle that Soho has stayed as distinctive as it has, given the amount a business would need to survive. And there’s a general assumption that, whatever the details, this is what did for Madame Jojo’s. How could you make a 21st-century profit from such a niche concern?  “No, no, no,” says Russell Norman, inventor of Polpo, Polpetto and Spontino, informal, Italian tapas joints, insisting Madame Jojo’s closed down because of the bouncers’ attack with baseball bats. “It was obviously a situation that needed a fair amount of scrutiny.”  He rejects, too, the idea that there are two Sohos, the quirky, seedy, sex-club one, and the Big Landord, crazy rent, corporatised one. “It’s ironic that usually the bad guys are reckoned to be the landlords of Soho, people like Soho Estates. That was founded by Raymond, who established the sex clubs and gave it its gorgeous seediness.”  Even he admits that the rents are crazy: “Our recent rent review on Beak street was breathtaking. But it’s the way of the world. Landlords have to make money just like the rest of us, they have people to employ.” I think Norman is the best thing to happen to London food since we discovered avocados, but this portrait of landlords as productive, job-generating people, just doing their best is … well, it’s silly.  I’d only been in Madame Jojo’s once myself, when my ex had a job as a stage manager. I thought it would be amusing to watch him scuttling around in a black polo neck picking up g-strings. It wasn’t amusing at all.  Since then, it had diversified – dabbled in entertainment with content besides nudity. It was, like its location, always too quirky to turn into a Spearmint Rhino. But the closure of one club, even that club, could never have sucked the oxygen out of this place. Soho’s idiosyncrasy and transgression is more of an atmosphere than an act.
There is sadness on the streets about the closure of the landmark venue – but optimism about the future of the area