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SOHO and COVENT GARDEN are very much the heart of London - and the centre's most characterful areas. It's here you'll find the city's street fashion on display, its more oddball shops, its opera houses, theatres and mega-cinemas, and the widest variety of restaurants and cafes - where, whatever hour you wander through, there's invariably something going on. There always was a life to these neighbourhoods, of course, but their aspect today is very different to the recent past. Both neighbourhoods started out as wealthy residential developments, then sank into legendary squalor, until their revival over the past twenty years. Soho retains a uniquely unorthodox and slightly raffish air, and gives you the best and worst of London. The porn joints that made the district notorious in the 1970s are still in evidence, especially to the west of Wardour Street, as are the yuppies who pushed up the rents in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Soho transformed itself again, this time into one of Europe's leading gay centres, with bars and cafes bursting out from the Old Compton Street area. Nevertheless, the area continues to boast a lively fruit and vegetable market on Berwick Street , and a nightlife scene that has attracted writers and ravers to the place since the eighteenth century. The big movie houses on Leicester Square always attract crowds of punters, and the tiny enclave of Chinatown continues to double as a focus for the Chinese community and a popular place for inexpensive Oriental restaurants. Covent Garden 's transformation from a fruit and vegetable market into a fashion-conscious quartier is one of the most miraculous and enduring developments of the 1980s. More sanitized and brazenly commercial than Soho, Covent Garden today is a far cry from its heyday when the piazza was the great playground (and red-light district) of eighteenth-century London. The buskers in front of St Paul's Church, the theatres round about, and the Royal Opera House on Bow Street are survivors in this tradition, and on a balmy summer evening, Covent Garden Piazza is still an undeniably lively place to be. Another positive side-effect of the market development has been the renovation of the run-down warehouses to the north of the piazza, especially around the Neal Street area, which now boasts some of the trendiest shops in the West End, selling everything from shoes to skateboards.
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