SOHO’S BAZAAR.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20380, 11 April 1928, Page 12

SOHO’S BAZAAR.

ODDLY CHEQUERED MEMORIES

Once every lady of fashion went shopping in Soho, and all the prettiest bonnets in town nodded and shook' over the stalls of the famous bazaar; the carriages waited in rows, and the coachmen went to sleep, the occasional gentlemen who ventured there in the wake of their ladies sucked their canes, scattered compliments right and left like sugar plums out of a ba", and wished themselves safe back in Piccadilly (writes Mary Morrissey in the London Evening News). But the ladies debated for an hour whether a purple or magenta feather would be the more becoming, vowed the new party ribbons were the charmingest ever seen, declared the green kid gloves odiously dear, and the saleswoman vastly pert, departed in a hutf — a nd came back again nest day, hpr the Victorian lady went to her favourite shop not merely to buy herself a gay ribbon, but to study the fashion and meet her friends, to argue the price of i rench lace, and discuss the latest scandal about Lord Bland and the actress from Drury Lane; and in all Victorian London it seemed there was no shop to' compare with the Soho Bazaar, either for the elegance of its wares or the quality of its patrons. Such oddly chequered memories as these are, of the fields of So-Hoe, where King James would have no houses built, lest they “ choak up the air of his Majesty s palaces and parks”; of Christopher Wren, who built its first great house for the Duke of Monmouth; of Mrs Cornelys, who drew all the town by her famous routs; of George, Prince of Wales; “ Old Q ” and others of their kidney, who took their rowdy pleasure at the notorious White House. But Monmouth House was pulled down long ago, and Mrs Cornelys died in the Fleet prison, and there is talk of building flats on the site of the White House where the Regency bucks made merrv; the parties and the orgies and the “fam’d bazaar” are all forgotten, an when fashionable ladies come that way it is tc buy queer things to eat in foreign grocers’ shops, and not to sigh for the passing of the'proud, shabby square whose first house was built for a royal prince, there in the fields of Soho.