Soho - illicit, glamorous, sordid, louche, poverty-stricken, squalid, exhilarating. One of Britain's best-loved historians, Dan Cruickshank, grants us an intimacy with centuries of rich and varied history as he guides us around the Soho of the last five hundred years. We learn of its original aspirations towards respectability, how it became London's bohemian quarter and why it was once home to its criminal underworld. The bars, clubs, theatres and their frequenters are described with detail that evokes the heart of the district. The history of Soho is written in its surviving architecture. Cruickshank points out the streets that were the stamping grounds of criminal dynasties and directs our attention towards the homes of renowned prostitutes, revealing Georgian sexual mores and surprising visitors - amongst them eighteenth-century painter Joshua Reynolds, whose peculiar 'caprice' was simply drawing the girls. Soho has been home to characters as diverse as Mrs Goadby's girls to the Maltese mafia, and Cruikshank draws these threads together with kaleidoscopic verve. Even as he mourns some of the changes, he pays testament to the district's resilience. He observes how the common denominator over the centuries is that it has always been a destination for immigrants: from French Huguenots to the East European Jewish community and recent Chinese diaspora - and that this is the foundation of its spirit and success.

London's Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its fin-de-siècle buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theaters. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be "outside" the nation. Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London's urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area's foreignness, liminality, and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.

A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo. American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. Introducing the idea—still potent in city planning today—that art could be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo was the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion of the creative class. In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists’ enclave to affluent residential area, focusing on the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment. Shkuda explores conflicts between residents and property owners and analyzes the city’s embrace of the once-illegal loft conversion as an urban development strategy. As Shkuda explains, artists eventually lost control of SoHo’s development, but over several decades they nonetheless forced scholars, policymakers, and the general public to take them seriously as critical actors in the twentieth-century American city.