After three establishing views of Old Compton Street and Piccadilly Circus, the credits present more specific details of the film's Soho setting through a tracking shot along a street, past characteristic shopfronts:
'Fruit Stores', 'Grapevine Club', 'Librairie Parisienne', 'Moulin Bleu', 'Club 100', 'Soho Records' and 'Cyril the Gents' Hairstylist' are all feasible Soho businesses but this is not a real place, just a studio-made composite. Some of the names allude to real establishments in the vicinity. The Soho Record Centre was on Dean Street, the 100 Club was on Oxford Street, and on Old Compton Street there was the Continental Fruit Store, the Librairie Parisienne and Cyril Henry the ladies' hairdresser.
We are then shown the amusement arcade that will be one of the principal locations, again a studio construction. Next door is a Church Army hall:
We are then shown the amusement arcade that will be one of the principal locations, again a studio construction. Next door is a Church Army hall:
A second shot past shopfronts shows us the Isola Bella and La Belle Etoile (both restaurants), The Modern Hairdressers and the Zodiac café:
This is different. These are real places on a real street. Compare with this 1955 photograph of Frith Street:
The credit sequence continues to combine real streets with studio constructions, as indeed does the film that follows. One of the locations is a flat above 40 Hanway Street, north of Oxford Street so technically not in Soho:
Hanway Street and the junction with Hanway Place are shown in two sequences:
The topography of the narrative has this street as the continuation of the street on which are the arcade and the succession of fake businesses shown in the credit sequence. The shot that follows the above has the couple continue walking along the street, but across the cut they pass from the real Hanway Street to the composite Soho street built in the studio:
They walk past, above, an exact reconstruction of the Zodiac café that was actually on Frith Street.
This last sequence of the film reveals more of the approximate Soho confected for the film, including a Continental bookshop that also seems to have migrated from Frith Street:
The junction of Hanway Street and Hanway Place also appears in the 1962 film Play It Cool:
(a personal note)
Hanway Street is an important place for me, firstly:
as my first ever destination on a solo trip up to London from the suburbs (Southgate at that point), because in 1974 the one place to find the latest import funk and soul was Contempo, on the first floor at 42 Hanway Street.
And secondly:
on the ground floor was (and is still) the wonderful Bradley's Bar, which I began frequenting in 1979 and still enjoy now. I played my first arcade game there (a table-top Space Invaders) and drank my first quality imported lager (something Spanish). Bradley's Bar has the best juke-box in London.
Hanway Street is an important place for me, firstly:
as my first ever destination on a solo trip up to London from the suburbs (Southgate at that point), because in 1974 the one place to find the latest import funk and soul was Contempo, on the first floor at 42 Hanway Street.
And secondly:
on the ground floor was (and is still) the wonderful Bradley's Bar, which I began frequenting in 1979 and still enjoy now. I played my first arcade game there (a table-top Space Invaders) and drank my first quality imported lager (something Spanish). Bradley's Bar has the best juke-box in London.
