‘I have always been proud to be a Soho girl’

‘I’m a former sex worker. I used to do striptease and I worked in Soho on and off for 12 years. When I first saw the area and the people, the bookshops and the fetish aesthetic, I just fell in love with it.

When I first arrived from Spain I lived in a squat – I needed a job and met a girl from Barcelona who was working in a peep show. There were two windows in front of me and all we had to do was dance naked with a really shitty pole. There was just a curtain between me and the other girl, and so if I wasn’t in the mood I could dance with my back to them and chat with her. Visitors paid £2 to look at us for one minute. There was another peep show and that was even funnier: they didn’t have a licence for full nudity so we were given heart-shaped stickers to cover our nipples! That one was even cheaper, they only had to pay £1 to see you for a minute. You worked lying on a bed: all we had to do was roll around. I really found it difficult to not fall asleep. That job was so surreal, and I love surrealism – the system imposes so many things on us that surrealism is a really good way to feel free.

I was combining working in the peep show with my photographic studies at Westminster University and was living a double life; I would be at university hiding my high-heel shoes. After eight years, I really felt that job gave me a lot of things. I gained confidence, it made me more aware of my sexuality, it kept me fit and I met so many amazing, inspirational women working in the industry. We had our own ways of protecting each other. We were like a little family and throughout my career I have always been proud to be a Soho girl.

Slowly these venues disappeared because they couldn’t afford the licences any more. It’s funny and sad at the same time that now there is a Mexican restaurant that has completely absorbed the aesthetics of the peep show, but the peep shows themselves are gone. What’s happened to Soho is more or less what’s happening to London: it’s losing its authenticity because of corporations.

The Soho raids [of 2013] were nasty. Using the excuse of vulnerable women being trafficked, more than 100 policemen descended and they brought the press with them. Workers were put out on the street and didn’t even have their coats on – they were just out in the cold in their underwear! It can be difficult to see but there is a lot of institutional abuse from the state.

The media either portray us as victims or as happy hookers. The reality is something in between. We all face the stigma, but there is good and bad. I think people should stop seeing us in 2D – just as sex workers – and see us as humans.’