Capital entertainment: how the West End became the playground of London

The West End was always something a little apart. Some years ago, I used to go drinking with a man who had jointly run one of the best Soho live music clubs of the late 1950s and 1960s. He told me that they received a visit in their early days from the Kray brothers demanding protection money, who were summarily told, in his words, ‘to fuck off’. When I expressed surprise at this apparently dangerous response, he explained that while the twins meant a lot in Bethnal Green at that time, ‘up West’ it was a different story.

Rohan McWilliam’s history of the West End explores the reasons for the distinct character of the area, covering the years between the start of the 19th century and the outbreak of the first world war (a second volume will continue the story up to the present). McWilliam defines the West End as ‘the area bordered by Bond Street on the west, Oxford Street on the north, (what is now) Kingsway on the east, and the river or the Strand on the south’, and traces the evolution of this two-mile-wide stretch of central London into a centre of the dramatic and visual arts, of gambling, music halls, restaurants and the hotel trade.