Carnaby Street is a pedestrianised shopping street in Soho in the City of Westminster, Central London. Close to Oxford Street and Regent Street, it is home to fashion and lifestyle retailers, including many independent fashion boutiques. Streets crossing, or meeting with, Carnaby Street are, from south to north, Beak Street, Broadwick Street, Kingly Court, Ganton Street, Marlborough Court, Lowndes Court, Fouberts Place, Little Marlborough Street and Great Marlborough Street. The nearest London Underground station is Oxford Circus. In 1934, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Sam Manning opened the Florence Mills Social Club at number 50, a jazz club that became a gathering place for supporters of Pan-Africanism. Carnaby Street in the early 1950s was a shabby Soho backstreet consisting of "rag trade sweat shops, locksmiths and tailors, and a Central Electricity Board depot practically took up one side of the street." The genesis of Carnaby Street as a global fashion destination began with Bill 'Vince' Green, a male physique photographer. In 1954 he opened opened a small clothing boutique 'Vince' in adjoining Newburgh Street, to capitalise on the homosexual body-building community that congregated around the Marshall Street baths. Those who modelled for the Vince catalogue and advertisements, and boosted its popularity, were the then barely-known Sean Connery and the hugely popular handsome boxer Billy Walker.To further attract custom, Green hired pretty young men as sales assistants, one of whom was the Glasgow-born John Stephen, later to be known as 'The King Of Carnaby Street'. Stephen opened the boutique His Clothes, in 1957 after his shop in Beak Street burned down. As Mary Quant later stated of Stephen, "He made Carnaby Street. He was Carnaby Street. He invented a look for young men which was wildly exuberant, dashing and fun." According to James Gardiner, who at one stage made ties for the Vince boutique, at this period Carnaby Street "was essentially a gay thing...The
