For around two-hundred-and-fifty years, Soho has been synonymous with sexual transgression, with commercialised sex in its many varieties, and helped originate a fair amount of the slang associated with sex. As far back as the late 1700s, the area played host to brothels and flamboyant nightlife. It also provided a home to sexual nonconformists such as Giacomo Casanova and the cross-dressing diplomat, soldier and French spy, the Chevalier d’Eon. Soho’s association with sex persisted through to the twentieth-century when the brothels were joined by pornographic bookshops, smutty cinemas, clip-joints, peepshows, and strip-clubs. Even now, in the wake of more than two decades of intensive gentrification, the link between Soho and sex persists not just in folk-memory but in the flourishing nightclub and gay scenes. 
 

David McGillivray played truant from school to visit Soho with his mate Jim. As it was the 1960s the Dirty Square Mile was still the heart of the British film industry and also a favourite haunt of street sex workers. David has been fascinated with Soho from that day to this, has worked and played there, written a lot about its history, and was hanging around Great Windmill and Old Compton Streets earlier this year when he hosted the first episode of David Gregory’s YouTube series “My Fleapit, My Palace”. He also makes a living writing comedy, panto, horror films and two editions of the book “Doing Rude Things”. 
 
Max Décharné is a writer and musician. Over the past four decades he has played gigs in most of the great Soho venues, drank in its pubs, worked in the film business in Wardour Street in the 1980s, then in the Vintage Magazine Shop on Brewer Street, where a day wasn’t complete without someone nervously asking for the X-rated under-the-counter material they imagined lurked beneath the till. His ten books include “Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of English Slang”, much of which can be traced back to Soho, St Giles and Covent Garden, whose denizens regularly took the King’s English to places it would probably regret in the morning.