Soho is an area in the centre of the West End of London, England, in the City of Westminster. It is an entertainment district which for much of the later part of the 20th century had a reputation for its night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s the area has undergone considerable transformation and is now a fashionable district of upmarket restaurants and media offices with only a small remnant of "sex industry" venues in the west of the area.
Soho has an area of approximately one square mile and may be thought of as bounded by Oxford Street to the north, Regent Street to the west, Leicester Square to the south and Charing Cross Road to the east. However apart from Oxford Street, all of these roads are nineteenth century metropolitan improvements, so they are not Soho`s original boundaries, and it has never been an administrative unit, with formally defined boundaries. The area to the west is known as Mayfair, to the north Fitzrovia, to the east St Giles`s and Covent Garden, and to the south St James`s. According to the Soho Society, Chinatown, the area between Leicester Square to the south and Shaftesbury Avenue to the north, is part of Soho, although some consider it a separate area.
