It’s strange being back in Soho, three years after leaving central London for Somerset. I’ve returned bang into Broadwick Street, borrowing a flat around the corner from where I lived ten years ago on Marshall Street, and beside William Blake House, where my dad had his flat his 80s and I visited him as a teenager (as per my parents’ custody arrangement).
Returning to Soho feels like a weird reversal of the way other people go back to their rural hometowns. I walk familiar streets finding memories of where I grew up: people I recognise, shops which still exist, remembering places I hid as a teenager to have a cheeky cigarette.
