Free The Sexual History of London by Catharine Arnold

that when they started sending threatening letters out.’ 17
    Megan appreciated that there were problems with the sex industry, and young girls being coerced into working as prostitutes, but pointed out that by being driven onto the street, she and her colleagues would be put at risk. ‘It’s a hard time for us, the recession is hitting our clients and the new laws are making them scared to come to us – even if they’ve been with us for years.’ 18
    The new laws Megan referred to represented yet another attempt to clean up prostitution, but for the working girls they may prove as punitive as previous legislation. The Policing and Crime Bill, passing through Parliament at the time of writing, aims to curb sex trafficking and protect women from being coerced into the sex trade. However, according to opponents, it would potentially criminalize men paying for consensual sex with a prostitute and women who employed maids or other workers to help them, damaging their business and forcing them to take greater risks. While in theory the bill appears to defend prostitutes, in practice it may become oppressive. According to Megan: ‘If the police carry on raiding us, we will lose customers and then be forced onto the streets. We will then be in the same danger as the women the police say they want to protect. It doesn’t make sense. But we will stand firm and fight any attempts to close us down.’ And so they did. In May 2009, the working girls successfully overturned Westminster City Council’s attempts to oust them from their flats in Shepherd Market. Megan’s parting shot to her interviewer on the London Informer proved prophetic: ‘This is the oldest business in the world and we’re not going anywhere.’ 19 Indeed, it was business as usual, ‘the oldest business in the world’, in one of the oldest cities in the world.

    A ‘West End Girl’ illustrates an investigation into the sex trade, 1966.

14

Plus Ça Change
    Sex in the twenty-first century
    As I wandered around the West End retracing the footsteps of the Victorian ‘Cyprians’ in Burlington Arcade, Megan’s rallying cry rang in my ears. She was not going anywhere. Or at least she was not intending to go far from her present flat in Mayfair. And neither were thousands like her. There would always be prostitution in London, just as there would be many other expressions of sexuality, and it seems reasonable that the girls get the protection and support they need from the authorities, rather than having to rely on pimps; they obviously provide a much needed service and deserve better conditions than those poor wretches we met at the beginning of the book, shivering on the Bankside in their chains.
    One thing that our sexual odyssey of London over the past two millennia has proved to me is that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they remain the same. As we emerge, blinking, into the sunlit uplands of the twenty-first century it is tempting to believe that we have progressed. Away with sexual guilt, priggish repression and Victorian Puritanism! With the advent of Sigmund Freud, Marie Stopes and the torrent of sex manuals which their disciples unleashed upon the world, from Married Love to the unintentionally hilarious Joy of Sex , and the sexual licence unleashed by two world wars, it might be reasonable to think that our secret sins and peculiar vices have disappeared in favour of briskly clinical couplings. Mercifully, nothing could be further from the case. London continues to yield its own rich crop of secret affairs, obscenity trials and sex scandals, every bit as byzantine as those of the preceding years. There will always be a boy in Piccadilly, leg hooked up on the wall behind him, indicating availability; there will always be a comely matron, prowling the Arcade, with a welcoming smile for the right man; or a slender brunette