24 Hour Soho

Wandering aimlessly around Soho at any time of day, on any day of the week, should be my emotional identity. My ample rear lumbers so often through it's streets and lanes, that Soho shop owners have undoubtedly started calling me The Idle Toad by now.

I love Soho to the max, it's the big fat, juicy cherry on top of life's heaving stress cake and as some high powered TV Executive in the midst of a nervous overload might say, is just..

"Amaze!"

I came across this curious coffin like entity on a recent episode in town. My foolish brain took quite a while to figure out what was going on..

..but after what seemed like an eternity, it identified it as a sleek new variety of street bench


According To The Internet™ they have been designed as the ultimate crime resistant addition to our apparently hellish streets. Anti-rough sleeping, anti-skateboarding, anti-graffiti, the list of kill joys goes on.


'Amaze' I hear you say?

Considering that pure function has resulted in a subtle expression of modern design, then yar, it's a little amaze. Let's take this design concept a little further though, and see if we can introduce full blown artistic mayhem onto our pavements.

Here's my next generation street bench concept..

 

Get that shit happening on the streets of Camden. I wouldn't mind some spinning light boxes attached to my FACE.

Continuing my... 'Yar I'm in Town' ....session, I headed deeper in to the woods and loitered around the bottom of Centrepoint for a bit, admiring the Centrepoint Apartments on St Giles Street and hoping that somebody would throw me down the deed to one as I did so.

I noticed their style was not unlike the street bench I'd seen earlier, smooth white granite, borderline sculpture. A little bit like the early 80's film Krull.

Some Krull flavours...

                                   You pickin' up what I'm puttin' down?

Starting to feel stimulated, I popped in to Cass Arts on Berwick Street, but found myself slightly irritated by the whole chain-store vibe, their twee sloganism and the fact that those are the things we go to Soho to escape from. So I got the fuck out of there as quick as humanly possible.

Which led me A. Past that Soho stalwart Bill Nighy and B. In to Walker's Court.

Seeing Bill Nighy in his trench coat, all louche and enigmatic restored my heart. He inspired me to imagine an even better Soho, one filled with poor people, artists and prostitutes. A place where women wear shiny plastic raincoats and men wear black eyes and hangovers.


                                                    
                                                    
The Soho look

                                                                  Ronnie

Zhora

Feeling exhausted by the humanity, I decided it was time to eat.

Worth a visit for the name alone, The New World on Gerrard Street in China Town offers not only scrumptious dumplings, but probably the only opportunity in the UK to feel like you're on the set of Seinfeld. I summarily ordered some dumplings as that was all I really cared for at the time, at which the look on the waitresses face turned from loving, naive child to..

'We're both in the Warsaw Ghetto, it's 1944. If you don't order any more food, you die'.

I ordered more.