SOHO and COENT GARDEN are very much the heart of London - and the center's most characterful areas. It's here you'll find the city's street fashion on display, its more oddball shops, its opera houses, theatres and mega-cinemas, and the widest variety of restaurants and cafés - where, whatever hour you wander through, there's invariably something going on. There always was a life to these neighborhoods, of course, but their aspect today is very different to the recent past. Both neighborhoods started out as wealthy residential developments, then sank into legendary squalor, until their real ore the past twenty years.

Soho retains a uniquely unorthodox and slightly raffish air, and gives you the best and worst of London. The porn joints that made the district notorious in the 1970s are still in evidence, especially to the west of Wardour Street, as are the yuppies who pushed up the rents in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Soho transformed itself again, this time into one of Europe's leading gay centers, with bars and cafés bursting out from the Old Compton Street area. Nevertheless, the area continues to boast a likely fruit and vegetable market on Berwick Street, and a nightlife scene that has attracted writers and rears to the place since the eighteventh century. The big movie houses on Leicester Square always attract crowds of punters, and the tiny enclave of Chinatown continues to double as a focus for the Chinese community and a popular place for inexpensive Oriental restaurants.

Coent Garden 's transformation from a fruit and vegetable market into a fashion-conscious quartier is one of the most miraculous and enduring developments of the 1980s. More sanitized and brazenly commercial than Soho, Coent Garden today is a far cry from its heyday when the piazza was the great playground (and red-light district) of eighteventh-century London. The buskers in front of St Paul's Church, the theatres round about, and the Royal Opera House on Bow Street are survivors in this tradition, and on a balmy summer evening, Coent Garden Piazza is still an undeniably likely place to be. Another positive side-effect of the market development has beven the renovation of the run-down warehouses to the north of the piazza, especially around the Neal Street area, which now boasts some of the trendiest shops in the West End, selling everything from shoes to skateboards.

London guide

London
The City
When to go
Climate
Arrial
Transport
Cafes & restaurants
Pubs, bars, clubs
London Music, Theatre
London Museums,
Nightlife
London Guided Tours
Best of London
Walking tours
Festivals and Special Events
London Eye

Explore London
Bloomsbury
British Library  
British Museum
Dickens’ house
Uni. of London
Kids London
Museums
Legoland
London Aquarium
London Zoo
Pollocks Toy Museum,  
Natural History, Science
Museums
Syon Park
Parks & city farms
Puppet Theatre Barge,
Unicorn Theatre, Little
Angel, more... 
Toys, Books, Electronics,
Magic and Skates