56 Dean Street

The Soho Society is a community association for the London district of Soho. It was founded in 1970 by local residents such as Bryan Burroughs and had over 1000 members. It campaigned against the domination of the area by sex shops and was successful in gaining the status of conservation area for the district. In 1978, it supported independent candidates for Westminster City Council to challenge the Conservative party's control of the council, as they were thought to be encouraging and exploiting the sex industry.The society is a registered charity and a recognised amenity society for the City of Westminster. In 1976, it established the Soho Housing Association to manage 400 flats for residents of the area.

The French House is a pub and dining room at 49 Dean Street, Soho, London. It was previously known as the York Minster, but was informally called "the French pub" or "the French house" by its regulars. It sells more Ricard than anywhere else in Britain, and only serves beer in half-pints except on 1 April, when a recent custom has been that Suggs serves the first pint of the day.

Saint Anne's Church serves in the Church of England the Soho section of London. It was consecrated on 21 March 1686 by Bishop Henry Compton as the parish church of the new civil and ecclesiastical parish of St Anne, created from part of the parish of St Martin in the Fields. The church is under the Deanery of Westminster (St Margaret) in the Diocese of London. Parts of its churchyard around its west including tower are now the public park of St Anne's Gardens, accessed from the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street. The church is accessed via a gate at that end of Dean Street. The parish, having spawned new churches to Saints Thomas and Peter in the era of compulsory church attendance, reconsolidated on Saint Anne's in 1945.

St Anne's Churchyard, also known as St Anne's Gardens, is a public park on Wardour Street in Soho, London. Formerly the churchyard of St Anne's, Soho, it was closed to burials in 1853. It rises 6 ft above the pavement, because of the 13,000 burials within it. It was laid out as a garden by the landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson on behalf of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association in 1891. It was opened to the public by Lady Hobhouse in 1892. The London plane trees remain a notable feature of the garden. It is managed by Westminster City Council and has received the Green Flag Award.War memorials to WWI and WWII are located in the churchyard on the wall of the church tower. The WWII memorial was only installed in 2012. There are a small number of memorials remaining within the churchyard, including the German adventurer Theodore von Neuhoff, who was briefly King of Corsica in 1736, and the essayist William Hazlitt, whose gravestone was restored in 2003.The gardens contain a memorial to the victims of the 1999 Admiral Duncan pub bombing. There are three art installations, all of which serve practical purposes: "Wall of Light" (an illuminated security fence), "Art Loo" (a WC with art displays) and "Table" (a monumentally-sized picnic table).

The Algerian Coffee Stores is a coffee shop in Old Compton Street in the Soho neighborhood of London, England. Founded in 1887, it is the oldest coffee shop in London.It was founded in 1887 by M. Siari, an Algerian, at number 52 Old Compton Street. It is still known as among the world's best leading suppliers of tea and coffee, and remains up to now one of the oldest shops in the street. It is situated next to the famous Admiral Duncan pub, which has been trading since at least 1832.

Heavenly Recordings is a London-based independent record label founded by Jeff Barrett in 1990. Heavenly released the first albums from Saint Etienne, Beth Orton and Doves, and early singles by Manic Street Preachers. Current Heavenly artists include Stealing Sheep, Mattiel, The Orielles, Confidence Man, audiobooks, Pip Blom, H. Hawkline, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Gwenno Saunders, Amber Arcades, Working Men's Club, Katy J Pearson and CHAI. Heavenly won Independent Label of the Year at the 2015 Music Week Awards. Other achievements include a Mercury Prize nomination for Saint Etienne's debut album Foxbase Alpha and three Number 1 albums with Doves. It is considered a key British indie record label, alongside Factory, Creation, Rough Trade, Mute, Ninja Tune and Domino.

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 Admiral Duncan is a public house in Old Compton Street, Soho in central London that is well known as one of Soho's oldest gay pubs. In 1999, the pub was bombed by neo-Nazi David Copeland, resulting in three people being killed and 83 being injured.

Comptons of Soho is a gay pub in London. Situated at 51–53 Old Compton Street in the heart of Soho's 'Gay village', Comptons has been an integral part of London's gay scene since June 1986.

The 2i's Coffee Bar was a coffeehouse at 59 Old Compton Street in Soho, London, that was open from 1956 to 1970. It played a formative role in the emergence of Britain's skiffle and rock and roll music culture in the late 1950s, and several major stars including Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard were first discovered performing there.

The Colony Room Club was a private members' drinking club at 41 Dean Street, Soho, London. It was founded and presided over by Muriel Belcher from its inception in 1948 until her death in 1979. The artist Francis Bacon was a founder and lifelong member, and the club attracted a mixture of Soho's low-lifes and its alcoholic, artistic elite, including George Melly, Jeffrey Bernard and Lucian Freud. Visiting non-members included many names from aristocratic, political and artistic circles, including Princess Margaret, William Burroughs, David Bowie and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The club attracted the Young British Artists in the 1990s.

De Hems is a café, pub and oyster-house in the Chinatown area of London just off Shaftesbury Avenue. It made its name purveying oysters and now sells beers from the Low countries such as Grolsch and Heineken with Dutch food such as bitterballen and frikandellen.It is on the site of the Horse & Dolphin coaching inn which was built in 1685 and had been owned by bare-knuckle boxer Bill 'The Black Terror' Richmond in the early 19th century. This was rebuilt in 1890 by the accomplished pub architects, Saville and Martin, for the publican, Mr Crimmen. It was renamed The Macclesfield, being in Macclesfield Street, and was soon leased by a retired Dutch sea captain called "Papa" De Hem who ran it as an oyster-house, charging a shilling and fourpence ha'penny for a serving. It was patronised by fin-de-siècle literati such as the poet Swinburne, who travelled 10 miles daily to eat oysters at the long marble bar, and George Sims who wrote a quatrain in praise: When oysters to September yield,and grace the grotto'd Macclesfield,I will be there, my dear De Hem,to wish you well and sample them.The rhyme alludes to the common proverb that it is only safe to eat oysters when there is an R in the name of the month — after the hot summer months from May to August. The grotto referred to was The Shell Room upstairs, created from the discarded oyster shells which decorated its walls — some 300,000 at their peak. Only a few now remain but the bar now claims to sell a similar number of pints of Oranjeboom each year. In the early 20th century, literary figures such as Clemence Dane continued to purchase the establishment's oysters, stout and champagne for their theatrical celebrations. In the 1920s, it became the hangout of gangsters too. When World War I started, patriotic Papa De Hem gave his staff £50 each to return to their threatened country. During World War II, after Holland actually fell to the German invasion, Dutch resistance exiles then met regularly at the pub which became their unofficial headquarters. Another patron at that time was the notorious spy, Kim Philby, who was friendly with the chef, who wore a tall white hat.In 1959, it was renamed De Hems in honour of the captain and then, in the 1960s, it became popular with music industry people such as Alan Price, Georgie Fame and Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones. At the turn of the new century, the venue hosted a comedy club — the Oranje Boom-Boom Cabaret — which included the debut of The Mighty Boosh.In the early 21st century, De Hems was popular as a place to celebrate and follow the successful Dutch football team. During the 2010 World Cup, hundreds of fans had to be turned away and manager Sian Blair had to hire a security staff of seven bouncers for the occasion. The upstairs and downstairs bars each accommodated a hundred cheerful revellers for these big matches.In July 2015, the venue began hosting a new comedy club, Linde Boom Boom Comedy Night,.