This is a book about working in a particular place, a place ‘built around enjoyment and entertainment’2 as well as exploitation and excess. It is about how that place ‘works’ to shape the experiences and identities of those based there. Occupying less than a square mile, London’s Soho is something of a simultaneously global and local space. With its golden squares, red lights, black markets, pink neon, blue films and, most recently, rainbow flags, Soho has, throughout its history, been a colourful place in which to live, work and consume. Described rather affectionately by cultural historian Judith Walkowitz as a ‘land of lost causes’,3 and by author Nigel Richardson, who experienced Soho bohemianism in the 1950s first-hand, as both ‘bad and beautiful’, it is a place of ‘backstreet industry and below-stairs debauchery’, where those who want to stand out can and those who want to blend in can become invisible.