In March 2008, newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced plans for a two-day national summit to be held in Canberra. The Australia 2020 Summit brought together 1000 of Australia’s ‘best and brightest brains’ to develop long-term strategic policies for Australia. Of these participants, 100 were given the task of presenting a strategic vision and recommendations on ‘Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world’. The 2020 Summit seemed to be one of the defining images of Prime Minister Rudd’s term of office from 2007 to 2010. It certainly marked a new development in the formation of Australian foreign policy. The summit was supplemented by school summits, a Youth Summit, various community summits, regional town hall forums and an open submission system that allowed all Australians directly to submit their policy ideas and recommendations. The inclusion of the broader public in a dialogue about Australia’s future role in the world was a notable departure from traditional foreign policy-making.

Place has often been conceived of in rather unproblematic, commonsensical terms: simply as the setting where social or economic activity occurs. Yet as feminist geographer Linda McDowell noted in her study of the City of London, ‘where things take place’ matters.1 Place matters in a material sense, giving something that is otherwise ideational a substantive form, but it also matters in terms of being ‘of importance’ to our perception and understanding; place matters insofar as it is of material significance and of significant meaning. Thinking about what place signifies in this way emphasizes that setting is far from a neutral backdrop against which social action occurs; on the contrary, it plays an active role in shaping the nature and lived experience of that action just as the ways in which we make sense of and interact with place impacts upon the setting itself.

As a place that ‘plays to all the senses’,2 Soho has, throughout its history, been something of an abject space, maintaining a long-standing appeal as simultaneously alluring and threatening, exploiting many of those who work and consume there, while at the same time carefully nurturing its reputation as a place of bohemian indulgence, offering a warm embrace and a sense of belonging in the heart of an otherwise relatively anonymous urban environment. In his Foreword to Bernie Katz’s book Soho Society, Stephen Fry emphasizes this, highlighting how the area has always offered ‘outsiders’ a chance to be themselves: ‘Soho’s public face of drugs, prostitution and seedy Bohemia … has always hidden a private soul of family, neighbourhood, kindness, warmth and connection, and those qualities shine through doggedly.’ Yet Soho also has an enduring reputation for violence and exploitation.

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.

As a consequence of the meanings attached to the setting and sector, and to the landscaping of the spaces within and around Soho’s sex shops, a high level of discretion as well as presumed intimacy characterizes the sales-service relationship. As discussed in Chapter 3, encounters with customers are neither a direct sexual exchange nor a simple sexual aestheticization of the service interaction. Sitting somewhere between the two extremes of sex work and sexualized labour, retail sales work in a Soho sex shop is a kind of abject labour, in an abject work place. As will be discussed here, it is experienced and perceived as both compelling and unsettling by those who perform it.

Michael, one of the many participants in the study on which this book is based, described how, on a rainy Monday morning, he had spent time explaining the relative merits of a small selection of soft-porn DVDs to a recently widowed elderly man who had never been in a sex shop before but who was in need of some ‘company’; he had been asked to model a pair of leather chaps for a gay couple looking for party wear (finding out only some way into his modelling session that the party they had planned was for three, if Michael was interested?); and he had been invited to try on the newly delivered store-branded T-shirts designed to convey the sexual eclecticism and corporate identity of the store in which he worked on Soho’s Old Compton Street, known as the United Kingdom’s ‘gay capital’.1 And a ‘local’ (the term used to describe regular customers rather than people who necessarily live or work in Soho) had asked Michael if he would let him have the socks he was wearing, as the customer said he wanted to smell them while he masturbated. For reasons unknown to me at the time, and seemingly to Michael, this was not an uncommon request.

The preceding chapters have argued that Soho’s distinctive history and location, its architectural character and its spatial layout dynamically combine to make it the workplace that it is. Its rhythms are less a pause in the flows of traffic, people and capital in the spaces that surround it and more a change of tempo – its constant resurgence and reinvention characteristic of its past, present and, no doubt, its future. The grand commercial thoroughfares of Oxford Street and Regent Street and the theatre districts of Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue have, throughout their existence, backed onto Soho’s narrow streets and alleyways. The latter have provided the sites of production for these commercial front stages, and they have endured as an escape from their conventional pleasures and performative pressures. The rush of public transport that surrounds Soho has never cut through its streets, many of which remain largely pedestrian or relatively inaccessible to fast-moving traffic.

Soho has a long history of embracing gender fluidity. One of its more famous eighteenth-century residents was the Chevalier d’Eon, who moved relatively seamlessly between living as a man and as a woman and, in doing so, set the foundations for Soho’s subsequent association with sex and gender as categories to be played with.