59 Greek Street: Home of the Theatre Girl's Club, Soho, London

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The main staircase rose at the building’s north end from the 5’9 hallway, entered from Greek Street through outer double doors. The Theatre Girls’ Club, frequented by young dancers, singers and actors, occupied the building for more than fifty of those years and it is principally the story of those years which is told here. The series brings together women who have likely, at one point or another, been labeled a ‘bitch’, whether because of their beauty, success, independence, or self-assuredness. Some five thousand poverty-stricken men, women and children lived in the streets of the Five Dials which ran fan-like from the southern-end of Greek Street out towards the Seven Dials, another famously deprived area.

With their theatre links, they transformed the tall house into a secure, although spartan, home for female performers from the Soho and wider area. This petite and refined woman, Maude Alethea Stanley, entered the back streets and courts of Soho’s Five Dials district encouraging the boys she found there to come to school and the women to lead better lives. Nothing stays the same for long, but luckily most of the buildings in Soho are owned by entities (Soho Estates, Shaftesbury PLC, and the Crown Estate) who more or less consider it in everyone’s interest to work to preserve the area’s unique character.We learn in detail about the lives of these young women (some of whom stayed on into their later years). This is the building, now reconstructed internally so that only its outer walls survive, which stands on the plot known as 59 Greek Street, built for Maude Stanley in 1883 and which was to become Virginia Compton’s Theatre Girls’ Club before the end of World War I. Dick James signed the pair to his publishing company (famous for its Beatles catalog) and Elton to a management contract. Any reception in the evening such as launch cocktails including trading beyond the permitted hours is strictly subject to the landlord's approval. During her time district visiting in the Five Dials, Maude Stanley had succeeded in encouraging some of her female protégés to live a more exemplary life, but she found that others viewed her home visits as intrusive.

Maude Stanley allowed nothing stronger than ginger-beer on the premises ‘and yet everyone seemed perfectly satisfied. It is also possible that she concentrated on Soho’s Five Dials for her social work because her brother Algernon already worked there as a curate with St.If we are lucky, and if we take care to protect it, Soho and Greek Street will stay beautiful, and delightfully shit, for a while longer.

What is more, it was something purposeful which middle- and upper-class women could do in years when work was barred to them. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. We use cookies to collect information about how you use the Charity Commission Register of Charities and Digital Services, such as pages you visit.

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