It's been a 'quiet night out' that has managed to last 10 years, but in a few weeks Petticoat Lane will literally become memory lane. Out with the wine tastings, poetry evenings and handbag exhibitions and in with the bulldozers that are set to reduce the whole area to rubble in January. Out of the ashes will rise a gleaming new, erm, office block.
'We've no choice unfortunately,' sighs Jamie Higgins, general manager of the ninetyseven group, which has been responsible for Petticoat Lane and its sister venues, The Pavilion and El Pomposo, over the past decade. 'We're just a tenant and the landlord has made the decision, so there's absolutely nothing we can do. All the residents that live above the area have had to move out too. We'll be the last ones in there.'
It will indeed be the end of an era. Just as petticoats themselves were seen as revolutionary garments in their day, this little lane - officially known as Tun Wo Lane, Central - set an early template for what was to become SoHo. A curious combination of outlets that, between them, couldn't decide whether they were kitsch, cool or both, a punter's first impression would probably be the galaxy of twinkling, scented candles and their wafting aromas.
At the very least, it was something completely different from the beery slurs of Lan Kwai Fong. 'Back in 1993, Lan Kwai Fong was all that you had really,' explains Higgins. 'So we started to look for somewhere that was close enough to Central, but far enough to take you out of the realms of the whole institutional feel of the area. Somewhere you could hide away.'
He claims to have literally stumbled upon the area. 'We found ourselves down this dirty alley only to discover this really chic, stylish building that was just simply full of potential,' he says. 'We kind of took the place over and turned it into Petticoat Lane. After a while people seemed to be talking about it, so we took the opportunity to branch sideways and open up a restaurant, a sister venue - The Pavilion.'
Is Higgins hoping to replicate the same kind of thing elsewhere? 'We're looking to relocate El Pomposo,' he affirms, 'but the other venues we won't be simply because they have their own character, and it's really hard to pick something up and relocate it. Of course we'll take certain things from within Petticoat Lane and Pavilion, so that when people come to the new El Pomposo - once we've found the new location - they'll be able to look back and think, 'Yeah, I remember that,' and so on. But we're not going to try to pick it up and relocate. In our experience that sort of thing never really works.'
