For the author who had grown tired of the frenetic life of the West End, the teashops and the red-lipped girls, Soho seemed to be the natural refuge. As the West End's shabbier cousin, tucked away in the narrow streets behind Piccadilly, Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, Soho was often seen as an anomaly, an island of heterogeneity and irregularity in the very heart of the commercialised central London where everything and everyone appeared to be increasingly standardised. By the 1930s Soho had long enjoyed a reputation as London's most mixed quarter, home to a heady variety of nationalities and professions. For John Galsworthy, writing in 1920, that ‘amalgam’ was all too much:

Indeed, Soho had always seemed more French, and then more Italian, Greek and Eastern European, than it had ever been English, and the foreignness was a source of intermittent anxiety for those who, like Galsworthy, counted themselves as representatives of the ‘British Body Politic’. For others, the foreignness was what made Soho appealing. According to Thomas Burke, ‘when the respectable Londoner wants to feel devilish he goes to Soho, where every street is a song. He walks through Old Compton Street, and, instinctively, he swaggers; he is abroad; he is a dog.’ It was easy to feel tough for a time while getting drunk in a Soho boozer; Patrick Hamilton boasted to his brother Bruce about his ‘wild’ Soho outings, one of which, he claimed, landed him in ‘a doss-house’. Like George Gissing gathering ‘useful ideas’ at a ‘die-sinker's place’ in Clerkenwell before writing The Nether World (1889), Hamilton thought of his nocturnal explorations of Soho as opportunities for making ‘sociological observations’. These sociological expeditions were different in kind from their nineteenth-century equivalents, which had been centred mainly on the East End and its picturesque landscapes of poverty and vice. Soho gained prominence as an alternative destination for literary slumming at least in part because it did not require writers to forego their daily comforts. No one traded their good clothes for rags in order to blend into this underworld, located only a stone's throw from the commercially glamorous West End.