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a national treasure, partly as a result of her brilliant soundbites: ‘I always seem to fall for policemen,’ she commented. ‘After every raid I got a new boyfriend.’ Cynthia was up in court again in 1987, on nine charges of controlling prostitutes. The thirteen-day trial kept the nation entertained with tales of sex capers, slaves, transvestites and undercover policemen while many establishment figures sympathized with her plight, such as the Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens who found it ‘astounding that all this public money should be poured into bringing these charges’. When, after just five hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Cynthia of all charges the courtroom burst into applause. In a trial costing £117,000, the judge ordered costs to be paid from central funds, and Cynthia’s £5000 legal aid costs to be reimbursed. As Cynthia emerged from court, she told a crowd of over a hundred well-wishers, ‘This is a victory for common sense. But I have to admit all this has put me off having parties for a bit.’ 14

    â€˜Madam Cyn’ (Cynthia Payne), the bawd of Streatham, leaving court in 1987.
    While entrepreneurs such as Cynthia had fled, Soho continued to have a raffish reputation throughout the 1950s and 60s. There were the clip-joints, where unsuspecting tourists were lured into paying £300 a bottle for champagne which tasted suspiciously, in the words of the Kinks, ‘just like cherry cola’. There were the prostitutes themselves, the peep shows and the fifty-eight sex shops. There were the ‘private’ cinemas, which operated like clubs, allowing patrons to watch films which had not got past the British Board of Film Censors; and there were the strip clubs. While the Windmill was forced to renege on its claim that ‘we never closed’ by closing for good in 1964 and becoming the Compton Street Cinema, Raymond’s Revue Bar opened on 21 April 1958 with a garish sign proclaiming it to be the ‘World Centre of Erotic Entertainment’. Raymond’s first job in show business had been as a mind-reader on Clacton Pier, and this early exposure to male psychology must have provided some useful insights, as he became a millionaire by exploiting the public’s fascination with sex. The ‘King of Soho’s’ empire included pornography, property development and the magazines Razzle , Men Only and Mayfair .
    The Revue Bar closed in 2004, a victim of the new permissiveness; soft-porn ‘lads’ mags’, the internet, cable television and DVDs rendered such venues superfluous; lap-dancing clubs offered more salacious entertainment; and Soho itself had been cleaned up by Westminster City Council on the orders of Dame Shirley Porter in the 1980s. Proprietors were forced to adopt discreet shop fronts and all blatant displays of nudity or sexual activity were banned. Just as New York’s raunchy Times Square was sanitized under Mayor Giuliani, London’s Soho lost its raffish quality beneath a tide of creeping gentrification, coffee shops and wine bars. Media types replaced alcoholic painters and dissolute journalists in the old pubs, and the milieu became just another part of the London heritage experience.
    London’s prostitutes responded by starting to fight back. Supported by the English Collective of Prostitutes (a lobbying organization founded in 1975), one group of whores from Shepherd Market put up a spirited resistance to Westminster City Council’s clean-up campaign in May 2009. Shepherd Market is a small quarter of Mayfair between Curzon Street and Piccadilly. Mayfair has always been one of the smartest addresses in London, realm of the super-rich and, traditionally, of the prostitute. From the eighteenth century onwards, Shepherd Market had been associated with high-class prostitutes. For years, the working girls and the aristocrats lived side by side; in the mid-1970s, up to one hundred girls walked