On The SoHo Village Fête, July 2026
The Soho Village Fete, if you have never been, takes place in Soho Square on a Sunday in July, and it is the single most improbable thing I have ever seen happen in a city of nine million people. Here is a square roughly the size of a supermarket car park, surrounded on all sides by advertising agencies, sex shops and men called Giles who make commercials for yoghurt, and once a year it fills up with bunting, a brass band of uncertain competence, and several hundred people queuing patiently for a tombola. I arrived expecting something faintly corporate and found instead a woman in a straw hat aggressively marshalling a raffle, a man selling homemade chutney at prices that suggested the gooseberries had been individually flown in from Provence, and a queue of forty people waiting to have a dog judged. Nobody could tell me what the dog was being judged for. It didn’t seem to matter.
The centrepiece is the waiters’ race, in which the staff of Soho’s restaurants sprint around the square carrying a tray bearing a bottle and a glass, and I cannot tell you how thoroughly this satisfies. It is exactly the sort of thing the British excel at: an event with no purpose, no prize money worth mentioning, and an unspoken but absolutely ferocious commitment to winning. One competitor, a slight man from a Greek Street trattoria, went past me at a speed that made his apron horizontal, and I have thought about him at odd moments ever since. Meanwhile a tug of war was being organised nearby with all the strategic rigour of the Normandy landings, and someone was announcing something over a PA system that had evidently been designed to make announcements incomprehensible, which everyone applauded anyway.
What gets you in the end is the sheer stubbornness of it. Soho is a neighbourhood that has spent seventy years being told it is finished — priced out, cleaned up, Disneyfied, done — and every year several hundred people who have refused to leave assemble around a mock-Tudor gardener’s hut to raise money for their own community and shout at a dog show. I bought a jar of chutney I did not need for £6 I did not have to spare, ate a slice of Victoria sponge off a paper plate while standing up, which is the correct way, and watched the light go long and gold across the square as a man in a boater sang something nobody knew the words to. It was, I decided, worth every penny of the £6. I still have the jar
