London's Property Prices Push Sex Out of Soho

London’s property wave is swamping the world’s oldest profession. The central Soho district’s prostitutes and sex cinemas are being overwhelmed by upscale restaurants, bars, hotels, and apartments in an echo of the transformation of New York’s Times Square in the 1990s. “When I started 30 years ago, there was a long run of peep shows,” says Paul Giorgio, who runs a fish-and-chips shop in the central London district. “Now people come in here and ask me, ‘Where’s Soho?’ If you take the sex industry away from here, you take away Soho. But I suppose they’ve got to if they want to make the money.”

Across the street from Windmill International, where more than 100 dancers strip nightly, the new Ham Yard Hotel serves the Fresh Fig Julep, a cocktail of bourbon, absinthe, mint, and homemade fig syrup, for £12 ($20). Walker’s Court, an alley once known for sex shops and adult movie theaters, is being converted into a high-end apartment complex. The cost of renting retail space in Soho rose 40 percent last year, to an average of £140 a square foot, according to broker CBRE Group. Office-building prices have almost tripled in the past five years, and office rents have doubled to £82.50 a square foot.