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Where London goes out after dark, district by district: the jazz cellars of Soho, the basements of Dalston, Camden's stages, Brixton's sound systems and the railway arches of Vauxhall.
The oldest nightlife district in London, and still the one that runs latest.
JazzCabaret & dragQueerRuns till dawn
Old Compton Street has been the gay high street since the late 1980s, when the bars stopped painting their windows over, and it is still where the district's centre of gravity sits on a Friday. Round the corner on Frith Street, Ronnie Scott's has been running since 1959 and plays two sets a night, the second one to a room that has usually been drinking through the first. Bar Italia opened in 1949 and shuts for about three hours around dawn.
What Soho is not is a club district. The rooms are small, mostly basements, and the night is built on moving between them rather than committing to one. It has also been rebuilt around its drinkers twice in twenty years - the Crossrail works took a block of it, and the rents have taken more - so several of the names that made it are gone and the ones that remain are the ones that own their freeholds.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.