A Soho Constant: A Year Inside Cuts
As Soho reinvents itself, some places simply carry on. Photographer Claire Doherty has spent a year documenting Cuts — the Frith Street salon that has kept its corner of the neighbourhood together while the rest changed — and the pictures go on show this October.
For a year, the London photographer Claire Doherty turned her lens on one small Soho institution: Cuts, the hairdressers on Frith Street. Not just the haircuts, but everything around them — the regulars and the drop-ins, the characters and the chatter, the whole ecosystem of a shop that has watched the neighbourhood change from the same chair for decades. Her project, 'Cuts: A Soho Constant,' is a portrait of the people and relationships that give a place its identity.
If you know Soho, you know Cuts. Founded by the late hairdresser and film-maker James Lebon in the late 1970s — first in a Kensington Market basement — it made its name on Frith Street in the 1980s: one of the coolest and most democratic rooms in London, where David Bowie, Boy George, Neneh Cherry and Goldie sat in the same chairs as vicars, bar staff and passers-by, and where the walls have always doubled as a gallery. It moved around Soho over the years and, in 2019, came home to Frith Street. Through all of it, the welcome never wavered: everyone gets the same.
That is exactly what drew Doherty in. Her subjects are the community that has grown up around the salon — creatives and bar staff, construction workers and long-standing customers, some of whom have been coming since the 1980s. Between them they tell a bigger story: what an independent business can be within a neighbourhood, and how much a place loses each time one of them disappears. In a Soho of chains and churn, Cuts is a reminder that some things are worth keeping.
The photographs go on show where they belong — at Cuts itself, 41 Frith Street, this October. The work will also feature in The Soho Clarion in spring 2027, and Doherty will be talking about the project on Soho Radio later this month. See more at clairelouisephoto.co.uk and on Instagram at @shotby_claire — and, while you're on Frith Street, you could always book a cut.
