Soho signs11/18/2023 ![]() ![]() Many of the neon lights that marked out these sexualised venues were created by Chris Bracey, a neon artist who is well-known for having illuminated Soho’s sex industry at its zenith in the 70s and 80s. ![]() In the 1950s, the sex industry established itself in Soho, and continued to grow for the following three decades. While London has a number of ‘markers’ that are associated with the city more generally, in Soho, neon functions as a marker of place for the collective gaze. Urry argues these are important for how people come to understand a space or place – and suggests these markers become signposts– that are ‘designed to help people congregate and are in a sense an important element of the collective gaze’ (Urry, 1995: 139). He argues that different places come to be known or associated with specific cultural markers –Paris and the Tour Eiffel, yellow taxis in New York City, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco – these are markers that make a place, and direct the visual gaze of those of visit these places. John Urry’s work (1995) on place-making helps us understand the significance of certain cultural signs on the creation of a city’s unique identity. The neon lights of Las Vegas, for example, lit up this shrine to debauchery in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and 1960s, and are still famous as their association with gambling, drinking and sex continue to define modern day Vegas. In many cities around the world, neon lights are often associated with bawdy night-time entertainment. These shifts in the retail landscape, and the changes to neon in particular, are an example par excellence of the process of hegemonic gentrification that we can observe in the lightscape of Soho. In parallel to the disappearance of neon associated with the sex industry, we observe that neon signs in Soho are increasingly being used by ‘clean-up’ venues that are new to the area as a way of demonstrating their authenticity. The gentrification of Soho can best be understood as a clear and strategic desire from both politicians and developers to remove the more overtly sexual elements to make way for something more sanitised. In recent years, Soho has experienced a rapid transformation that we suggest is part of a process of top down sanitisation, which we term ‘ hegemonic gentrification’. Our ethnographic research, collected from 2015-2018 in this vibrant area of London, documents seismic shifts to the lightscape of Soho that reveal drastic socio-cultural and economic structural changes as a result of gentrification. Indeed, we argue here that the neon lights of Soho are central to its reputation, and have an important impact on the development of its uniquely risqué character. The bright, glaring neon lights of Soho have long illuminated its deviant character, signposting gay bars late night drinking dens, sex shops and brothels, burlesque venues and strip clubs – all of which constitute the fabric of the night-time economy in this central London location. Magali Peyrefitte and Erin Sanders-McDonagh
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |