This guide is designed to be both inspirational and educational, providing the information and creative stimulation needed for successful completion of a natural stone project.

Choat chuckles when I tell him this, and assures me he won’t refurbish the Coach: “I like it as it is. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. A young-ish man with messy blond hair and arms full of artful black tattoos, Simpson agrees that Greek Street is something special – he bought Milroy’s after a few years in corporate ownership. As the Theatre Girls’ Club, it excluded males and gave preference to performers; in turn, these young women, mostly in their early teens on arrival, were excluded from normal lodging houses. Asked what the Soho spirit is, Shrimplin says it’s all about the people: “A big part of what I love about Soho is that you can have a place where the sky’s the limit for the bill, and a few doors down you can get a meal for five quid.Greek Street, a large house near Soho Square at the heart of London’s west end, was first set up as a ‘club and home for working girls’, whose history is traced in these pages through personal memories. The latter is of especial interest to the early story of 59 Greek Street: Solly and Hill were leaders in the setting-up in 1869 of the London Charity Organisation Society which spread an international influence in the giving of aid to the poor, albeit based on the worthiness of the recipient.

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. The building has been a hostel for a long time and was last used by Centrepoint to provide accommodation with 26 beds for homeless young people. If a professional cleaning is needed, this will be quoted for and then charged to the tenant or deducted from the deposit.There are about 3,000 local residents currently living in Soho but it used to be more like 30,000 back in the 19th century, says Shrimplin, an unassuming man who walks with a cane (we keep getting stopped by people on the street as he tells me he’s “part of the furniture. Maude Stanley planned the demolition of the old building at 59 Greek Street and erection of the new because she wanted to raise something suitable for a club and home for the working girls and young women of Soho. You need to know it’s there as you wouldn’t be able to tell by walking past – Shrimplin points out clubs right and left as we wander through Soho, behind there, upstairs here, downstairs here – and you need to be a member to get in. Milroy’s was always about drinking whisky regardless of how much you earn, where you’re from, where you live, and that’s what we’ve changed it back into,” Simpson tells me, as we’re sitting in the bar before it’s open. What is more, it was something purposeful which middle- and upper-class women could do in years when work was barred to them.

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. 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. Choat, a tall guy in a Bowie shirt and chunky silver rings, took over the freehold of the 1847-born, Grade II-listed pub eight years ago when “London’s rudest landlord” Norman Balon retired after 63 years.Image-maker Daniel Sachon will reveal a never-before-seen photography series BITCHES in Soho during Frieze week.