Adieu Soho...or, the office move

The job I had before I moved to London was in a small Canadian city in a business park lodged in the suburbs. It was one of those horrible high-tech ‘campus’ sort of places where there was nothing to do aside from work, and possibly eat at the campus cafeteria, and then go to the officially sanctioned work gym. Occasionally for a treat we’d take our cars and go off the mall. It was something right out of Douglas Coupland’s ‘Microserfs’, and even though my job wound up being lucrative (this was the late 90s, remember—and I’m a web designer by trade), I hated having to work someplace so desperately soulless.

So when I started my current job (over 2.5 years ago now), it was a bit of a shock to be showing up every morning to a chaotic studio space down a dank side street in Soho, London. At first I was a bit surprised by my environs—the sex shops, the theatres, the pubs and bars, the continual police presence, the tramps and vamps and everyone of any description wandering the streets. My first few weeks of lunch hours were spent poring over my book in the Brewer Street Caffé Nero, wondering if I had made the right decision about my career. Even though I had been living in London for a few months, I still felt like a wide-eyed tourist for much of the time, floating about and getting lost among the winding streets of my new city, feeling alienated by the scope and breadth of the city. I remember one day getting hopelessly lost while looking for the Royal Academy of Arts and winding up calling N on his mobile, me desperately lost in tears. In those early months it seemed that London could easily defeat me.

But then on my lunch hours at work, I started making baby steps away from the few streets that I knew. Slowly Soho opened up to me, showing me its blue plaques, history, beauty, and character. I found lots of great places to eat and to shop. I wandered further, down beautiful Piccadilly, and discovered parks, garden squares and Mayfair. I began to know all the little side streets and could instruct tourists on the street where to find the best fish and chips (at the end of Berwick Street, incidentally) and the boutiques of Carnaby Street. Meanwhile, what I had thought was just a 5-month contract at work turned into a full-time job.

We packed up the office yesterday. Unfortunately the great drawback of having an office in London’s vibrant, humming epicentre was the expense, and so we’re moving on to Clerkenwell (where there will be much to explore as well, I’m sure). I’ve been moping and melancholy all week about the move, surprising even myself that I’d feel so sentimental about such a busy and often dodgy part of town. But I guess what’s making me upset is that even though Soho wouldn’t have been high on my list of London’s loveliest areas, it’s been where I have learned to love and accept London for what it is—someplace both mad and beautiful, sacred and profane, filled up with every story of human experience possible.

Goodbye, Archer Street, Soho, W1D 7AZ.