The lost charm of London’s St Giles

London's architectural landscape is changing at such a pace that it's hard to remember what's been lost beneath the acres of tarpaulin. Buildings I must have walked past a thousand times and that I could have sworn were important landmarks have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Despite the devastation there appears to be little in the way of pushback from harried, post-pandemic Londoners. How quickly we forget what our eyes once took for granted; the familiar razed without a second glance.

The area known as St Giles, just east of Charing Cross Road and south of New Oxford Street, has suffered more ignominy than most. Once a bohemian enclave and the ramshackle heart of London’s music scene, it was also where my parents shared a flat and later married, and where I have spent the past couple of years. It had always been Soho's wayward, slightly seedy uncle – and with its dingy backstreets, underground dive bars and spooky alleyways, one could almost smell the soot of Victorian London.

That all changed when Crossrail was announced, and with it the promise of substantial new 'footfall opportunities'. Developers rubbed their grubby paws in glee and as the tarpaulin skirts flew up, one of London's most arresting neighbourhoods came crashing down. St Giles, we were assured, would soon rise again to become a beacon of 21st century urban chic­­ ­– as if we needed another of those. But instead, the quirky and characterful area where the Stones and the Pistols first made their mark quickly descended into an unseemly architectural free-for-all of Hieronymus Bosch proportions. As the cranes moved in, generic coffee chains and TKMaxxes swallowed up the last of the dusty independent bookshops made famous by Helene Hanff's romantic novel 84, Charing Cross Road.

You would have hoped an area steeped in so much creativity might have garnered a modicum of respect, but once the developers smelt blood there was no stopping them. For the past decade or so they have pummelled and pile-driven the old neighbourhood into the ground. Not since the dark days of the 1960s have so many architectural gems been lost to 'progress'; the daintily domed Astoria, one of London's most beloved music venues, was the first to go, swiftly followed by the handsome terraces abutting Tottenham Court Road Tube station.

This bristling, battered intersection had grown accustomed to casual abuse. In 1966 the vomitous 33-storey Centre Point landed on the site where gallows once stood. The skewed footprint of London's first 'statement' high-rise (now 'luxury apartments') obliterated an entire neighbourhood, including one of the city's grandest circuses, second only to the one at Piccadilly. Here, the elegantly curved frontages of the now decimated St Giles High Street converged on London's three main shopping arteries, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. Archive photographs show a harmonious mishmash of architectural styles with sweeping, almost Romanesque vistas fanning out in all directions.

Travel back beyond the lavish Victorian era and in St Giles you would find one of London's poorest, most notorious 'rookeries' – a filthy, sordid hellhole where criminal gangs ran amok. Charles Dickens wrote about the Irish poor who lived in the area's many rundown tenement buildings. My parents had an apartment on Grape Street, a narrow alleyway behind the Shaftesbury Theatre said to be where William Hogarth found the inspiration for his 1751 ‘Gin Lane’ illustration.

Slightly further north, where Renzo Piano's garish £450 million multicoloured St Giles Central now stands, the trail of Dickensian squalor once continued. Thomas Beames, a 19th century preacher who compiled witness accounts of the rookery's dire living conditions, expressed shock at what he found: ‘A dirtier or more wretched place I had never seen. The streets were very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours.’ To add insult to injustice, in 1814 a torrent of beer from a damaged brewery flooded much of the area, drowning residents in their basements. The Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew described the area’s citizens as 'fat, ragged and saucy'. 

Over at nearby St Giles-in-the-Fields, Henry Flitcroft's Palladian masterpiece and one of the few remaining buildings from the rookery period, you can still find huddles of boozy tramps. Perhaps the ghosts of their ancestors have drawn them here; those 'filthy odours' still hang heavy on a Friday night.

But in the other direction, the new St Giles development is finally emerging from the bowels of the rookery after ten long years of disruption – and what a sorry collection of toy-town tat it has turned out to be. Outernet London, the centrepiece of this dystopian atrocity, is 'an immersive media and entertainment business boasting the world's largest high-resolution wrap around screens'. Yup, more than a decade of eye-wateringly expensive planning and construction and the best they can come up with is a giant corporate billboard moonlighting as a 2,000-seat venue. Gazing up at the boxy gold and black exterior, I'm reminded of those mega nightclubs found in places like Guildford and Nottingham. Consolidated Developments must have thought they were making such a bold statement, but when every other building on the block is clamouring for attention all you are left with is a cacophony of incoherence.

The one concession in all of this has been the 17th century frontages along Tin Pan Alley, where the planning agreements specify that all businesses and retail units must be music-related. A couple of guitar shops and the café where David Bowie used to hang out have survived, but there are plenty of boarded-up shop fronts too. With rents rising and the industry in freefall I worry that this precious 350ft long drag may be destined to become another blandified tourist trap like poor denuded Carnaby Street.

Emerging from the Outernet I find myself staring wistfully at a familiar doorway belonging to one of the last remaining Victorian mansion blocks in the area. The entrance to 132 Shaldon Mansions is just as grand as I remember – for it was here that, in the words of Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, I secured my 'very first agent', a sinister little man with ruddy cheeks, gravy-stained teeth and a shock of white bouffant hair. His breath reeked of Dunhill Internationals and stale cava, while the walls of his grim 'office suite' (which doubled as a bedsit) were plastered with black and white headshots of all the young male hopefuls he'd procured with the promise of a Hollywood career. I was a struggling newbie at the time and grateful for the attention.

Peering through the sooty glass door panels, I spy the dingy staircase up which I'd trudge for fruitless meetings. 'Darling boy,' he'd simper 'I've put you up for oodles of exciting projects this week'. I often wonder whether Barry might have been the inspiration for Uncle Monty's hapless agent Raymond Duck in Withnail. After all, he too resided 'four floors up on the Charing Cross Road' with 'never a job at the top of them’.

Shameless eccentrics like Barry sum up for me the essence of what once made this scuzzy part of town so appealing. Tragically, we shall never see the likes of him, or his old stomping ground, again. And no, I never did get to 'play the Dane'.