One of the Soho Society’s first concerns is the level of noise to which residents are subjected and will be subjected to still further if all the outstanding planning permissions are granted. I have had, and lost, a few fights with the planning and licensing arms of Westminster council on my own account, having failed to convince them that another all-night rooftop bar 20-feet from my bedroom will have an adverse impact on my sleep. “What you fail to grasp,” I try to explain, “is that rooftop drinking is noisier than any other sort. The twin exhilarations of being close to the moon and keeping other people awake will turn the most sullen and taciturn street-level drinker into a howler and screamer whose every laugh lands on your pillow, still sticky with craft beer and spittle.” They see me for what I am. An aging killjoy who shouldn’t be living in Soho at all if he cares about what lands on his pillow.

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That I shouldn’t be here is a slur I find more than a little hurtful. I was a Soho aficionado long before many of those who see it only as a business opportunity had even started their Diplomas in Management and Profiteering. I came here in my brothel-creepers — I’m not saying where I crept I them — as a hopeful lad, not knowing if I had the courage to avail myself of all Soho had to offer, but in a state of heated curiosity — a scholar of hedonism and sensuality with a notebook in my hand — eager to understand its allure, and that allure had nothing to do with noise. If not exactly silent, Soho in those days was broody with the quiet of anticipation. You didn’t shout what you wanted. Your being here was a secret. You frequented empty alleyways. When you looked up to the solitary red light burning in a window, you didn’t yell what was on your mind. You didn’t know what was on your mind. It would reveal itself to you in good time, in silent nods and hushed whispers above which you could hear your every heartbeat, even those your heart missed. Be still, be still, you told yourself.

We have lost the clandestine arts. We get our idea of sex from film and television where love-makers imitate either the Malayan jungle or Jeremy Clarkson’s farm, screeching, wailing, snuffling. Orgasm was once an occasional secret shared by two. A small confidential triumph when attained. It is now proclaimed democratically on Dolby sound from any of the rooftop bars the council has given another license to. How else do we know we’re having a good time unless we shout about it? The word we once found too gross to use and were never sure how to spell has grown commonplace. The whole world c***s and wants you to know about it.

Pre-sex, unless it’s post-sex, unless it IS sex, the drinkers of all genders take to the self-pedaling bars, drunk on their own hilarity. They aren’t having a good time. If they were having a good time they would be savoring it more stealthily, letting a small light shine from eyes that shyly meet, communicating soft secrets through the darkest velvet. What we have instead is blatantly obedient, ersatz merriment. Simon says get bladdered. Simon says scream. Simon says guffaw. Howard says shut-the-f-up.

The hen-nighters have taken to the discotheque tuk-tuks, singing Kylie favorites. I have a soft spot for Kylie. I was once made honorary Australian of the year at a do where she was voted real Australian of the year. After I told how I had loved being called a bastard by Australians in my years in Sydney she leaned across the dinner table, parted the artificial vegetation and said, “You bastard, Jacobson.” It’s hard to forget a moment like that. But I am not obliged to abandon what I believe for nostalgia’s sake. Please no more tuk-tuks, no matter what Australiana the piss-pot passengers are belting out.

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After midnight the cars engineered to sound like tank divisions take to Soho’s Streets. Exhausts go off like rifle shots. When a door is closed you think a skyscraper has been hit by a missile. Some of them are still blowing off their exhausts in the early morning. On days I haven’t slept at all, I get up and run after them. “I hope you crash, you infantilized moron!” I shout and look to other fraught pedestrians for support. I get none. Since I am on my own, I act alone, running down the middle of Wardour Street shaking my first. Two motorbikes, both defying the one-way system, converge on me. They too have been souped up in hell to sound like the annihilation of the world.

So, is this the original raucous Soho which the business owners demand the Soho Society leave alone? They make an obvious and fundamental error. They think a racket is synonymous with authenticity. They think a love of life can be measured in decibels. Let me tell them what I want, and it isn’t staid sobriety. I want fewer shops selling sneakers, less bubble tea, no more fake jollity imported for the weekend from heartless towns in the West Midlands. I have lived here for 25 years and watched the life drain out of what was once gloriously louche and seedy. I’d like Francis Bacon back. And Brendan Behan. But the artists and writers have disappeared, as have their studios and attics. Words have abandoned the streets to grunts. The brothel-creepers languish unwanted on eBay. That’s what’s really gone wrong — Soho is in danger of becoming like everywhere else.

Beneath the fluttering red and gold lanterns on Gerrard Street, drivers unload vats of rapeseed oil fresh from China, for cooking up batches of deep-fried pork balls and the like. In the windowless Lo’s Noodle Factory in a passageway off Wardour Street — nicknamed “alleyway place” in Cantonese — three men churn out 2.5 miles of ho fun a day. And at Little Newport Street, a client is directed on how to skip on the pavement by an employee of the Hong-Ning medicine clinic (a sign in the window reads “Forget Viagra, Think About Herbal Male Tonic”).

Geoff Leong, who arrived from Hong Kong aged ten, now runs Leong’s Legend (its kitchens are in the basement where Ronnie Scott ran his first jazz club) and Dumplings Legend (site of the Mont Blanc restaurant, which played host to Belloc, Chesterton and Conrad in the early 20th century). He says the industry is now so “cut-throat” that “you’ve got chefs being poached left, right and centre. The entire team is like an army, so when the head chef goes, they will take everybody with them.”

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This time, he headed to New China to enjoy the type of sizzling Sichuan meal that would have been unheard of in London in decades past. “They had this incendiary braised beef dish that was so delicious. You were on fire when you ate it. The quality of cooking has really gone up. Now we’re shifting away from the crispy seaweed thing. I noticed non-Chinese are ordering real Chinese dishes.”

Many restaurants once had their main menu in English, with a second, featuring the real deal — gelatinous beef tendon and gristly pig’s knuckles — reserved for Chinese customers in the know. But while the kitchens have risen to meet the challenge of more adventurous British palates, many family restaurants are now facing stiff competition from deep-pocketed international businesses as interested in global brand-building as viable enterprises. Haidilao, China’s biggest hotpot chain, now has a 10,000 sq ft branch on the edge of Chinatown.

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“When you change Chinatown into a neighbourhood that is totally dependent on footfall and this superficial grab-and-go blend of businesses,” says Aitken-Turff, “that affects what happens to the other businesses. A tourist comes to ‘do’ Chinatown. I think it’s a revolting phrase — come, grab a bubble tea, snap a selfie under the gate and disappear.”

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Yau successfully led the charge against McDonald’s breaching the ornately decorated gates of Chinatown, but has been less capable of preventing the proliferation of the betting shops she feels prey on the area’s low-income workers. She says although she understands that in the heart of London, capitalism will win out, she would like to see the council put in safeguards to ensure “Chinatown should remain Chinatown”, adding: “At least 80% should be Chinese restaurants.”

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Andrew Leong, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says Chinatowns are essential sanctuaries that reduce racial tensions and help new arrivals acclimatise: “These physical communities are a symbolic and logistical site of belonging, especially with the recent increase of people from Hong Kong escaping from the PRC.” But Caroline Knowles, professor of sociology at Goldsmiths and author of a report on London’s Chinese migrants for the Runnymede Trust, is pessimistic about its future. “I think that if it survives, it will be owned by private equity, it will be hugely glossy and more Disneyfied,” she predicts. “It will be a simulacrum of itself. I don’t think it will have any real connection with the grittiness of Chinese business and restaurant life, which was based on migration from China. I think it will become just like the rest of central London — expensive and plutocratified.”

According to his friend, film producer Damon Bryant, one of the first on the scene, the flat was pristine: “He put flowers in every vase. He was as sober as a judge. There were no drugs. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

His funeral about a month later was spectacular, even by Soho’s flamboyant standards. A horse-drawn cortege inched its way around the tight grid of streets. Thousands of mourners followed; among them Sienna Miller, Sadie Frost, Alfie Allen, Noel Fielding, Robert Elms and Jaime Winstone. All of them knew the little man who was lying there, silent, and alone.

Bernie Katz was the man they called the Prince of Soho. For 27 years, he had worked as front-of-house manager of the Groucho Club, the long-established and exclusive private members’ club in Soho where, in the 90s, Princess Diana went to lunch and Bill Clinton once played saxophone: a dizzily decadent playground for the rich, the famous and the not-so-famous.

The term “Prince of Soho” was marked out in flowers on the horse-drawn hearse; his title was coined by the actor and writer Stephen Fry, who was closer to Bernie than most.

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Bernie’s funeral made the BBC News at 6pm; he would have been thrilled, everyone said. As TV and radio presenter Robert Elms put it: “He was the essence of this place. He was preposterous, he was gorgeous, he was five foot nothing and had a heart bigger than this square… Bernie knew everybody. If you were touched by Bernie — and it probably meant he touched your bottom — you stayed touched.” Noel Fielding described him as “always in a leopard-skin jacket, whirling around like a windmill. He was a character. I don’t think those people exist anymore.”

Yes, he was a character — but what kind of character? As a member of the Groucho, I knew him a bit, but not well. One person told me that Bernie was the sort of person who was your friend for 60 seconds — and would then disappear. The circumstances of his death — and the strange events that led to his demise, from the moment he left the Groucho in unexplained circumstances a few months before — are explored in my podcast series, Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho?.

Bernie’s death was a shock to many. But it was also a motif — an acknowledgment of another death; that of old Soho itself.

Nowadays, Soho’s spirit has been sold to the highest bidder; the developers have got their way. Independent restaurants are few and far between — on Broadwick Street, there is now a branch of the Ivy, unthinkable 20 years ago. Berwick Street market, for years an impeccable source of all manner of questionable items has been gentrified. The fruit vendors have made way for stalls selling flat whites and falafels.

These streets were once Bernie’s manor: he had worked in the West End pretty much from the moment he left school. Born in 1967 to a Jewish family in south London, as a teenager he witnessed the murder of his father, a gangster called Brian “Little Legs” Clifford. Bernie would later write of his “gangster father” whose life ended with a bullet in the head: “So used was I to a life of drive-by shootings, I thought nothing of the sound of that gunshot, except that it intruded upon my viewing of the Price Is Right.”

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That murder has never been solved. And neither was Bernie’s own demise. Indeed, the latter, as I discovered, was never properly investigated.

Bernie had joined the Groucho as barman in 1990, just before Cool Britannia when the club was at its drug-fuelled zenith: even though the management had — and still has — a strict zero-tolerance policy of drugs.

The Groucho is the kind of place that is guaranteed to divide opinion; there are those, like me, who are long-standing members, and won’t have a word said against it. Others are less enamoured, dismissing it as pretentious and elitist. (To which members reply: isn’t that the point of a club?)

Founded in 1985, the Groucho began as a club for the media and publishing worlds. By the 90s, it had become an infamous celebrity haunt. Inevitably, some members did drugs; the upstairs snooker room was occasionally known as the “Peruvian Procurement Department”. In 1996, the room was the scene of a furious showdown between actress Patsy Kensit and her then-boyfriend, Liam Gallagher. Glasses and snooker balls were thrown, and Gallagher ended up trashing not just the table but the room itself.

Other moments, too, became Groucho legend: Melvyn Bragg chatting to U2; Friends star Matt LeBlanc propping up the bar alone one Saturday night; Dancer Wayne Sleep once took Princess Diana there for lunch — and handed her the bill. On one memorable night in 1995, Damien Hirst put his £20,000 Turner Prize money behind the downstairs bar.

And throughout it all, Bernie was there. He would sashay from table to table, clad in leopard skin and Cuban heels, soothing the pampered members, dealing with their tantrums, dropping in a witty or caustic remark. The Bernie stories, like the man himself, were outrageous, lurid and always true. He proved his chutzpah by once ejecting Madonna for being rude.

Stephen Fry, a founder member of the Groucho, was closer to Bernie than most. “My first impressions were of a huge, vibrant and outgoing personality,” he told me. “All hugs, grins, extravagant language and wild attire.” But, he went on: “There probably was something sad about Bernie …  It may seem glamorous… but in fact there was a lot of work, very little money and too many temptations into addiction and late nights.”

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I talked to dozens of Bernie’s friends, family members and Groucho regulars: all spoke warmly of him, though some were curiously reluctant to go into detail about the last weeks of his life. Others were deeply puzzled. Actress Alison Steadman told me: “Bernie was fun and kind. When he walked in, the room lit up. I have never been able to establish exactly what happened and why… but whatever it was, it was so wrong.”

So what did happen to Bernie? Bernie’s tragedy, his surviving family and friends told me, was that after he left the Groucho, with no regular job, he had begun to succumb to the addictions that had dogged him through his life.

The precise reasons for his departure were never properly explained, though many believe his self-indulgent figure ran counter to Soho’s sanitised new world. Whatever the truth, without that job he lost his own sense of worth. He soon found himself short of money, and ended up taking small loans from friends.

And then, his close friends told me, things quickly escalated. Put bluntly, he got on the wrong side of the wrong type of people — specifically, it was whispered, Albanian gangsters and their constant demands for repayment over drug debts. As one friend said: “He had a lot of debt, and that debt was related to buying cocaine, which there were rumours it was an Eastern European gang. That was being spoken about a lot… thirty grand to the Albanians, or whatever it was.”

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The drug trade in Soho, for most of Bernie’s life, was dominated by Italians and Maltese gangsters. But sometime in the last decade, the Albanians squeezed them out. They were frighteningly ruthless, violent and brooked no dissent. Bernard Clifford Katz — camp, easy-going and sweet-natured — would not have stood a chance.

Certainly by the time of his death, the Albanians had cemented their control in London. Even now, four years after Bernie’s death, they are still at the forefront of the cocaine trade in this country which is worth billions.

Perhaps if the Albanians had stayed out of Soho, just at the time Bernie was working there, he might never have fallen out with gangsters. If he hadn’t been such a gregarious soul, he might have kept his job. And if he’d have kept his nose clean — in every sense of the phrase — he might still be welcoming guests into reception and charging across the room in his Cuban heels.

But that wasn’t to be. For Bernie, Soho was a timeless neighbourhood of decadence and debauchery. Until it wasn’t.

After his death, the Groucho renamed its downstairs restaurant “Bernie’s” in his honour. On one wall sits a beautiful portrait of him; he looks strangely relaxed and at peace — a memory to a golden era of Soho that has since decayed.

Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho is available at now.

It only struck me some time after reading two superb books on the Booker shortlist this year – Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black and Anna Burns’ Milkman – that they had something in common: both draw much of their force from the protagonist’s watchful, wary navigation of looming threats. They reveal this, however, using completely different styles.

Washington Black first unfurls in a Barbados sugar plantation in 1830: its story is told in the first person, through the eyes of Wash, who is an enslaved boy of 10 or 11 when the story starts with the ominous arrival of a “tall, impatient, sickly” new master. Wash senses evil: “He owned me, as he owned all those I lived among, not only our lives but also our deaths, and that pleased him too much.” Edugyan’s writing style is poetic and clear, with an ear for the verbal formality of the era: the brutality of slavery seeps through the elegant prose.

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One piercing aspect of this book – particularly in the pages before Wash flees the plantation – is its understanding of how keenly sharp a sense of vigilance is needed to survive in a brutally untrustworthy world. Small errors of judgement might lead indirectly to violent beatings or worse; the faintest danger must be scented far in advance of its arrival. Fear is written in the involuntary responses of the body, even before it is clarified in the mind: “I felt the soft tremor of my hands in my lap.”

When an older white man, Mister Philip, compels Wash to accompany him to an isolated spot and then proceeds to shoot himself, the thing that really terrifies Wash is not “the sudden violence, which had been with me since birth, but from the terrible fact that I alone had been present at the death of a white man”. With an unforced touch, the depth of slavery’s internal reach is conveyed. Escape, when it comes, is all the more welcome.

The 18-year-old female protagonist of Milkman inhabits an unnamed city and time, but one that looks and feels very like 1970s Belfast, where the author grew up in the thick of the Troubles. The narrator, known only as “middle-sister”, has much more freedom to steer her fate than Wash, of course, but she too must be vigilant: she moves in a volatile community, mined with potential violence, where the constant slosh of rumour and grudges can suddenly harden into open threat.

When a powerful paramilitary known only as “Milkman” begins to stalk her, a complex weight of judgements descends upon her. Burns’ mode of writing is radically different from that of Edugyan: nerviness is baked into the style, which is full of concealments, layered considerations and circumlocutions, the highways and byways of a mind under intensifying stress. Real names are not revealed, and nor are those of terrorist organisations – they are “renouncers” or “defenders” – and the steady warping of domestic life is signalled by slick piles of murdered dogs and a headless cat.

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The reviewer in the New York Times called Milkman “interminable” and “wilfully demanding and opaque” – but I had quite the opposite experience: I found it consistently gripping and darkly funny. Perhaps, being from Belfast myself, both its cadences and its caginess were more immediately familiar. There’s still a bit in many of us from that city that – when asked too forward a question – instinctively responds: “Who wants to know?”

For those who, following Milkman, have an appetite for another book set in Belfast, I can recommend rediscovering Brian Moore’s brilliant 1955 novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, about a Catholic spinster struggling to stay afloat in fraying circumstances, as acutely poignant a portrait of loneliness as I have ever read.

Two other honourable mentions: one is Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, translated from the German by Damion Searls. I’m still in the midst of it: at nearly 2,000 pages, with 367 chapters, it’s a behemoth of a book, but worth the commitment. The novel charts a year – between 1967 and 1968 – in the New York life of Gesine Cresspahl, a German émigré, and her young daughter Marie, as arguments rage over Vietnam; in parallel, it recounts the story of Gesine’s family during the 1930s in Jerichow, a small town in Germany. Anniversaries is a huge feat of the imagination, dense with vivid, criss-crossing detail and moral complexity: every part of history that Johnson’s pen touches springs to life.

The other pleasure was Christopher Howse’s Soho In The Eighties, an affectionate but enjoyably clear-sighted portrait of the wilfully eccentric, louche drinkers – linked to a variety of professions – who were so often bolted to bar stools in Soho boozers such as The French House and The Coach & Horses. They included Jeffrey Bernard, the former author of the Spectator’s ‘Low Life’ column, who became famous nationwide for his wit and disintegration. Howse, who drank among them, has a wonderful turn of phrase himself: he describes one filthy little pub, the Kismet, as “like drinking in a badly run public lavatory”. The ‘characters’ would have grown tedious at times in real life, I suspect: many of them enjoyed giving their well-worn catchphrases repeated outings. But there was also badinage, camaraderie, feuds and idiosyncrasies aplenty, and a kind of purity to their habitual recklessness. In an era of rampant offence-taking and aggressive public piety, this book is a welcome blast of smoky air.