Wong Kei

The Flamingo Club was a jazz nightclub in Soho, London, between 1952 and 1969. It was located at 33–37 Wardour Street from 1957 onwards and played an important role in the development of British rhythm and blues and modern jazz. During the 1960s, the Flamingo was one of the first clubs to employ fully amplified stage sound and used sound systems provided by ska musicians from the Caribbean. The club had a wide social appeal and was a favourite haunt for musicians, including The Who.No 37 Wardour Street was previously the address of the Shim Sham Club, which opened in 1935 and was known as "London's miniature Harlem".

Café Monico was a restaurant on London's Shaftesbury Avenue. It was originally established in 1877 at 15 Tichborne Street in 1877 by the brothers Giacomo and Battista Monico.The first World Weightlifting Championships, then known as the International Amateur Weight Lifting Championship, was held at the Café Monico in 1891, and the Climbers' Club was formed there in 1897.The banquet for the London 1899 chess tournament took place there.After some time as the nightclub Avalon, a refurbished Cafe Monico reopened under the new ownership of Soho House in April 2016. It became a two-floor restaurant serving European dishes under the supervision of consultant chef Rowley Leigh.The restaurant closed permanently in 2021.

Rupert Street is a street in London's Soho area, running parallel to Wardour Street and crossing Shaftesbury Avenue. Rupert Street is first mentioned in records in 1677, and named for Prince Rupert of the Rhine.The northern part of Rupert Street is part of Soho's gay village. A small alleyway, Rupert Court, links Rupert Street to Wardour Street in this area. At the northern end of Rupert Street, Rupert Street meets Brewer Street, and is continued by Walker's Court. The southern part of Rupert Street is part of Soho's Chinatown area.

The Sondheim Theatre (formerly the Queen's Theatre) is a West End theatre located in Shaftesbury Avenue on the corner of Wardour Street in the City of Westminster, London. It opened as the Queen's Theatre on 8 October 1907, as a twin to the neighbouring Hicks Theatre (now the Gielgud Theatre) which had opened ten months earlier. Both theatres were designed by W. G. R. Sprague. The theatre was Grade II listed by English Heritage in June 1972.In 2019 the theatre's name was changed from the Queen's to the Sondheim Theatre (after Stephen Sondheim) after a 20 week refurbishment. The theatre reopened on 18 December 2019.

The Gielgud Theatre is a West End theatre, located on Shaftesbury Avenue, at the corner of Rupert Street, in the City of Westminster, London. The house currently has 986 seats on three levels. The theatre was designed by W. G. R. Sprague and opened on 27 December 1906 as the Hicks Theatre, named after Seymour Hicks, for whom it was built. The first play at the theatre was a hit musical called The Beauty of Bath co-written by Hicks. Another big success was A Waltz Dream in 1908. In 1909, the American impresario Charles Frohman became manager of the theatre and renamed the house the Globe Theatre, a name that it retained for 85 years. Call It a Day opened in 1935 and ran for 509 performances, a long run for the slow inter-war years. There's a Girl in My Soup, opening in 1966, ran for almost three years, a record for the theatre that was not surpassed until Daisy Pulls It Off opened in April 1983 to run for 1,180 performances. Refurbished in 1987, the theatre has since presented several Alan Ayckbourn premieres, including Man of the Moment (1990), as well as a notable revival of An Ideal Husband in 1992. During reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe theatre on the South Bank, in 1994 the theatre was renamed the Gielgud Theatre in honour of John Gielgud. Another refurbishment was completed in 2008. The Globe's theatre cat, Beerbohm, became famous enough to receive a front-page obituary in the theatrical publication The Stage in 1995.

SegaWorld London was an indoor theme park located inside the London Trocadero in London, England. The venue opened up in September 1996 and operated as a joint-venture between Chorion, the owners of the Trocadero, and Sega. At 110,000 square feet, it was claimed to be the largest indoor theme park in the world. It was Sega's flagship venue in Europe and the first Sega theme park outside of Japan. The venue struggled with attendance which led to an early exit from Sega in the joint-venture, leading to its owners renting the space to the owners of the nearby Funland arcade which merged together with its existing branch nearby, and remained as such until its permanent closure in 2011.

Pinoli's Italian Restaurant was an Italian restaurant owned by Carlo Pinoli at 17 Wardour Street in what was then the Little Italy area of London's Soho district, with another frontage on Rupert Street. It was founded in the 1890s.Pinoli's was known for good food at low prices, and was popular with celebrities, journalists and politicians.The Magic Circle was founded in Pinoli's in 1905. There is now a blue plaque to celebrate the occasion.Pinoli became a British citizen in 1906, and died in 1927. He is buried in Brompton Cemetery. Pinoli's closed in 1949.The location of Pinoli's restaurant is now part of London's Chinatown. The name 'Pinoli' is still visible at the top of the building frontage in Wardour Street.

Gooseberry Sound Studios, also known as just Gooseberry Studios, were recording studios at 19 Gerrard Street, Chinatown, London, located in a cellar underneath a dental practice.The studio was owned by Peter Houghton and was known in its early days for its particularly cheap rates. This affordability made it popular with reggae artists and punk bands wanting to make cheap demos.

The Almost Free Theatre was an alternative and fringe theatre set up by American actor and social activist E. D. Berman in 1971 in Rupert Street, Soho, London.Audiences paid what they could afford, but at least one penny. It also pioneered the lunchtime performance, which bought in a whole new audience. The theatre staged seasons, including the first season of gay plays in Britain, the first women's season, a Jewish season, an anti-nuclear season and a season to mark the 1976 American Bicentennial. There were readings of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's controversial The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1976) on Irish politics. Numerous individual new plays by writers Mike Stott, Henry Livings, Michael Stevens, Wolf Mankowitz and Edward Bond were performed. Tom Stoppard developed several of his key one-act plays here, including After Magritte and Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth. His highly successful Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land went on to transfer from the Almost Free to run for four-and-a-half years at the Arts Theatre.

Shaftesbury Avenue is a major road in the West End of London, named after The 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It runs north-easterly from Piccadilly Circus to New Oxford Street, crossing Charing Cross Road at Cambridge Circus. From Piccadilly Circus to Cambridge Circus, it is in the City of Westminster, and from Cambridge Circus to New Oxford Street, it is in the London Borough of Camden. Shaftesbury Avenue was built between 1877 and 1886 by the architect George Vulliamy and the engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, to provide a north–south traffic artery through the crowded districts of St. Giles and Soho. It was also part of a slum clearance measure, to push impoverished workers out of the city centre. Although the street's construction was stalled by legislation requiring rehousing some of these displaced residents, overcrowding persisted. Charles Booth's Poverty Map shows the neighbourhood makeup shortly after Shaftesbury Avenue opened. The avenue is generally considered the heart of London's West End theatre district, with the Lyric, Apollo, Gielgud and Sondheim theatres clustered together on the west side of the road between Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross Road. At the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road there is also the large Palace Theatre. Finally, the north-eastern end of the road has another large theatre, the Shaftesbury Theatre. Also on Shaftesbury Avenue is the former Saville Theatre, which became a cinema in 1970. It was first known as ABC1 and ABC2 but, since 2001, it has been the Odeon Covent Garden. Another cinema, the Soho Curzon, is located about halfway along the street. Between 1899 and 1902, no. 67 Shaftesbury Avenue was the location of the Bartitsu School of Arms and Physical Culture, which is the first commercial Asian martial arts training school in the Western world.Shaftesbury Avenue marks the boundary of three discrete West End areas. The subsection of the road from Piccadily Circus to Cambridge Circus marks the southern border of Soho. Of that subsection a slightly shorter stretch thereof, from Great Windmill Street to Cambridge Circus, denotes the southern edge of the Soho gay village. Overlapping the gay village boundary, the still-shorter part of the street from Wardour Street to Greek Street marks the interface between gay Soho and London's Chinatown. The number of Chinese businesses on the street has been on the increase. On the ground level in Aug 2007, there were two traditional Chinese medicine practices, five Chinese restaurants, three Chinese supermarkets, three Chinese travel agents, two Chinese mobile phone outlets, a Chinese cake shop, two Chinese hair salons, a Chinese fishmonger, a Chinese newsagent, a Chinese bureau de change, and three Chinese banks.In the evening, street artists gather on the pavement outside the HQ of ICE - International Currency Exchange and Raphaels Bank (previously the home of NatWest) at the Piccadilly Circus end of Shaftesbury Avenue, and produce portraits for the tourists.

The Brain was a house and techno music venue in Soho, London. It was located on the former premises of the Apollo Club on 11 Wardour Street. The Brain was founded in 1989 by Sean McLusky and Mark 'Wigan' Williams. Several now famous DJs and producers played at the club, including Norman Cook, Orbital, Leftfield, Billy Nasty, Goldie, Moby, Graeme Park, The Shamen, Mixmaster Morris, Ariel, Andrew Weatherall, and A Guy Called Gerald. At the time there was little actual live performance on the techno scene (this would change later with the advent of raves). The Brain encouraged live sets and P.As at a time when only mainstream house music used vocals on tracks. The club is also famous for the eclectic crowd it attracted, including the likes of; Boy George, Gilles Peterson, Bobby Gillespie, Chemical Brothers, Rankin (photographer) and Jefferson Hack founders of Dazed & Confused (magazine), Paul Oakenfold, John Galliano, Rifat Ozbek, Gavin Rossdale from Bush (British band), sommelier Jamie Drummond, artists Olly and Suzi, Trip City (novel) author Trevor Miller, Tim Simenon, Neneh Cherry, Mark Moore, George Michael, The Farm, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, Robert Elms, editor of The Face Sheryl Garrett, founder of Loaded (magazine) James Brown, Jonathan Pocock, Michael Sale, Simon Woodruff and Ozwald Boateng. Global celebrities like Christy Turlington, Brigitte Nielsen, and Matt Dillon were also spotted inside the venue.Sean McLusky went on to set up (the now defunct) Brainiak Records with Tim Fielding releasing music by such early UK electronic heroes as Ultramarine and Pete Lazonby, as well as legendary compilation albums Live at the Brain - Volumes One and Two, B-Sides and The Best of Brainiak. In the early and mid-1990s Sean McLusky masterminded various seminal London clubs and venues including; Love Ranch at Maximus with Mark Wigan, Club UK, The Scala (club) in King's Cross, and the multi-faceted Sonic Mook Experiment. In 1994 Tim Fielding co-founded Mr C's London nightclub The End.

The Apollo Theatre is a Grade II listed West End theatre, on Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster, in central London. Designed by the architect Lewin Sharp for owner Henry Lowenfeld, it became the fourth legitimate theatre to be constructed on the street when it opened its doors on 21 February 1901, with the American musical comedy The Belle of Bohemia.