| Abstract | London’s Soho is often cast as a quintessential case of a culturally rich, socially mixed inner-city district losing its “soul” to gentrification, touristification, neoliberal urban policy and other external pressures. Reflecting on the neighborhood’s recent transformation, this chapter both engages and unsettles this narrative. It traces how Soho’s celebrated “edginess,” cosmopolitanism and queer nightlife have been reworked through tightly coupled public–private interventions, from the regulatory “clean‑up” of the sex trade to property-led redevelopment that produces a branded rather than grounded uniqueness. At the same time, it foregrounds intra-community conflicts to show that appeals to community, heritage and “saving” Soho mask competing visions of what the neighborhood is and ought to be. Mobilizing non-essentialist understandings of place and community, it emphasizes that Soho is better understood as a densely storied, contested place than as a singular community under siege, and calls for a move beyond simplified narratives that pitch “the community” against external pressures. |
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