Xtra Diary - City Hall reined in by the 'Soho king'

Published: 27 May 2011

“KING of Soho” Paul Raymond’s Soho Estates empire has been in the news a lot recently. 

The company wants to refurbish Walkers Court, the street where the now defunct Raymond Revuebar was based, in a scheme that could see the replacement of the Revuebar sign with an LED screen advert and the creation of a covered walkway along the street. 

Paul Willetts, author of Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond, who is set to speak tonight (Friday) at Westminster Reference Library, said this was not the first time the street has been earmarked for improvement.

He said City Hall once wanted to build “metropolis-style raised walkways” there – plans scuppered by Raymond himself.

“Paul Raymond was someone not renowned for having a conservation angle,” said Mr Willetts, “but because he owned so much of the property around there and was happy to sit on it, he stopped it from being redeveloped.”

• Mr Willetts will speak about his book alongside Mark Glendinning of the Sohemian Society at Westminster Reference Library, St Martin’s Street, WC2, from 6.30-7.30pm tonight. To book a place call  020 7641 5250.

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Directors’ plans that held water

TWO-hundred years ago today (Friday) the directors of what would become the Regent’s Canal Company met in the Percy Coffee House in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, to press ahead with plans for the new waterway.

The café is no longer there, but the canal most certainly is, and tonight canal enthusiasts will gather in a nearby Caffè Nero to raise their coffee cups. “The canal had no name at that date, it was known as the London Canal or the North Metropolitan Canal,” said Anthony Richardson, chairman of the Regent’s Canal Conservation Area Advisory Committee. “Earlier schemes had failed but this meeting brought success. 

The Prince Regent consented to the name, a prospectus was issued and the company had its first meeting a few days ahead of August 12, the Prince’s birthday.” 

The canal runs from the Thames through Hackney, Islington and Camden, continuing under Maida Hill and Paddington and winding up in Little Venice, where it fuses with the Grand Union Canal to the North.

• The event will take place tonight from from 6-7pm at Caffè Nero, Percy Street/Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, W1.

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Poems do justice to court experience

WITH its stuffy rooms, broken vending machines and overworked staff, Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court can spark groans of dejection even among hardened hacks.

But the drab 1970s courthouse, where people accused of petty (and sometimes not so petty) crimes are dealt with, has proved to be a well of inspiration for one poet, who spent a year regularly flitting in and out of its public galleries.

Victoria Bean (pic­tured), who lives near Queen’s Park and does voluntarily work with young offenders, recently released a volume of poetry, Caught, which records in verse the high drama and low comedy of the English justice system. Some of what she saw made her smile, but other cases made her “blood freeze”. “One that sticks in my mind involved a particularly menacing trafficker,” she said. “He had trafficked women into the Soho sex trade. Usually you can see some humanity in people, but he was chilling.” Her previous work has been collected by the Tate and the V&A.

She said she enjoys using poetry to capture the “essence” of cases in the courts which would otherwise go unrecorded.

• Caught by Victoria Bean is published by Smokestack Books, £7.95.

Bean’s Horseferry verse

For the girls
His history’s all in the texts he sent:
mass immigration & hundreds of flights on stolen credit cards,
patterns made by the telephone numbers of flying girls into the Midlands before sending them down to London,
Buckingham Palace Road, and life in a Greek Street brothel.

He bites when he fights
Somewhere, on a night out in Victoria underneath the hoardings of a Wicked or a Billy Elliot show, 
he was rude about the Irish and bit a man twice.

The benefits of a real fire
The judge says you’re on a hopeless, homeless spiral,
but when you set that bin alight you had some warmth and for a moment a bit of a welcoming glow.

Fares please
You had to get your sick daughter from her Nan’s before the post office opened, before you could get your dole.
The man from Silverlink says the one pound fifty you owe him is now one hundred and fifty pounds.