Heritage Walking
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London Soho and Covent Garden: From the Cholera Pump to the Piazza

An outdoor walk through Soho and Covent Garden, with no visits inside the buildings. It runs from Carnaby Street through the back streets of Soho, past the pump at the centre of John Snow's cholera study, Soho Square, the house where television was first shown and Chinatown, to Seven Dials, the Covent Garden piazza and its market hall. Nine stops, about 70 minutes, ending outside the Royal Opera House.

This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.

At ~70 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in London makes a full-day itinerary.

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London, United Kingdom · ~70 min · 2.8 km · 9 stops

Stops on this walk

1. Carnaby Street

A plain seventeenth-century back street that became the world centre of men's fashion in the 1960s.

Look along the narrow pedestrian street ahead, lined with small shopfronts. This is Carnaby Street, and its fame rests on about ten years in the 1960s. The street itself is much older. The Survey of London records that it takes its name from Karnaby House, a large building put up here in 1683. Small houses followed within a few years. A writer in 1720 called them ordinary, and the street never became a fashionable address. In the eighteenth century a market house stood on the east side. The market closed in 1820. The change came in the late 1950s. If you look up at the corner building at the Beak Street end, you may spot a green plaque. It honours John Stephen. It calls him the founder of Carnaby Street as world centre for men's fashion in the 1960s. In 1957 Stephen opened a menswear shop in this street. In April 1966 the American magazine Time ran a cover story on London, the swinging city. It singled out this narrow, three-block-long street, crammed with boutiques. It also reported that nine of the boys' shops here belonged to John Stephen. The shops have changed many times since then. The street is still lined with small shopfronts, much as it was in his day.

The street is closed to most traffic and the shops are commercial, with no entry fee to the street. The plaque is on the building at the Beak Street end.

2. The Broad Street Pump

In 1854 John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to the water from this pump, and on his evidence its handle was taken off.

Look at the black iron pump on the pavement beside the pub. It is a replica, standing where the real pump stood. A plaque on the pub says a red granite kerbstone marks the site. The street was called Broad Street until 1936, when it became Broadwick Street. At the end of August 1854 cholera broke out here. The doctor John Snow later wrote of upwards of five hundred fatal attacks in ten days, within two hundred and fifty yards of one corner here. Many doctors then believed that cholera spread through bad air. Snow suspected the water. He mapped the deaths and found them clustered around this pump. Then he looked at the exceptions. A brewery stood in the street, near the pump, with more than seventy workmen. None of them suffered severely from cholera. The men were given an allowance of beer, and the brewery had its own deep well. The workhouse in nearby Poland Street had more than five hundred inmates and its own pump well. Only five of them died of cholera. The most telling case was far away in Hampstead. A cart went out there from Broad Street every day, and it brought a widow a large bottle of water from this pump, because she preferred it. She died of cholera, and so did a niece who drank the same water. There was no cholera in either neighbourhood at the time. On the evening of 7 September Snow put his evidence to the parish Board of Guardians. The handle of the pump was removed the following day. Snow himself noted that the attacks had already fallen sharply before the water was stopped. By then many residents had also fled the district. What he left behind was a method. He traced a disease to its source by counting cases and asking where each person drew their water.

The pump is a memorial with no water supply. The pub beside it is named after John Snow and carries plaques about him. Look down for the red granite kerbstone in the pavement.

3. Soho Square

A square named for Charles II, whose statue was carted off in 1875 and came back sixty years later.

Look through the railings into the garden. In the middle stands a small black-and-white timbered hut, and near it a weathered stone statue of a king. Trees may hide part of the view from the pavement. Both are listed at Grade Two. These were fields until 1677, when they were leased for building. The houses went up quickly, and by 1683 the parish ratebooks called this King Square, in honour of the reigning king, Charles the Second. On maps of the eighteenth century it is already Soho Square, and that name won in the end. The statue is Charles the Second himself. The sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber carved it in 1681. It once stood high on a pedestal in the middle of a fountain, with figures of the rivers Thames, Severn, Tyne and Humber around it. The fountain did not last. By 1803 it no longer worked, and a few years later a writer described the statue as being in a most wretched mutilated state. In 1875 and 1876 the garden was laid out again. The statue was carried off to the grounds of the painter Frederick Goodall at Harrow Weald. The timbered hut was built in its place, part tool shed and part arbour. The king stayed away for more than sixty years. He came back in February 1938, though not to his old place in the centre. For most of its life this was a private garden for the people who lived around the square. During the Second World War air-raid shelters were built in it. Westminster City Council then took a lease and opened the garden to the public in April 1954.

If the garden gates are open, you can walk in and see the statue and the hut close up. The council sets the opening hours, and the view through the railings works at any time.

4. Frith Street: Baird and Mozart

The attic where television was first demonstrated in 1926, two doors from where the boy Mozart lodged in 1764.

Look at the café front at number 22 and find the round blue plaque above it. It says that in this house John Logie Baird first demonstrated television, in 1926. Baird, a Scottish engineer, used two attic rooms in this building as a laboratory in the mid-1920s. On 26 January 1926 he demonstrated his television system to members of the Royal Institution. The Survey of London describes it as the first demonstration of true television. English Heritage calls this the building where he invented and demonstrated the first working television. The street has an older story too. In 1764 and 1765 the young Mozart, aged about nine, lodged next door but one, at number 20, with his father and his sister. Their landlord was a staymaker named Thomas Williamson. From that address, in January 1765, Mozart dedicated a set of sonatas to Queen Charlotte. That spring his father, Leopold Mozart, advertised in a London newspaper. Ladies and gentlemen could call between twelve and three on most days and, with a ticket, hear the boy and his sister play in private. They could also test his musical gifts by giving him music to play at sight. The house where they stayed has since been demolished. The street is named after Richard Frith, the bricklayer who developed this part of Soho from the late 1670s.

The ground floor of number 22 is a café and the upper floors are private. Look at the plaque from the street. Number 20 is no longer the house Mozart knew.

5. Gerrard Street, Chinatown

Chinatown's main street runs over an old drill ground, on a street where Dryden lived and Johnson's Club first met.

Look along the street at the hanging lanterns, the Chinese signs and the decorated arch at the western end. Gerrard Street is the main street of London's Chinatown. Its name and its line are about three hundred years older than any of that. In the early seventeenth century this ground was the Military Ground, where a company of citizen soldiers founded in 1615 practised their drill. In 1661 Charles, Lord Gerard, a royalist soldier of the Civil War, paid for the company's interest in the land. Houses went up in the 1670s and 1680s, and the street still carries his name. It soon drew writers and artists. The poet John Dryden lived in a house on the south side. In 1764 the painter Joshua Reynolds and the writer Samuel Johnson founded a dining society known simply as The Club. Its first home was the Turk's Head tavern in this street. Edmund Burke was one of the original members, and both he and James Boswell had lodgings in Gerrard Street. London's older Chinese community grew up far to the east, in Limehouse near the docks, with businesses serving Chinese sailors. Much of that area was damaged by bombing in the Second World War. After the war, as Chinese food grew popular and new arrivals came from Hong Kong, Chinese restaurants and shops opened in these West End streets. When the Survey of London described this street in 1966, it found a few of its first houses still standing among later buildings. The new community made its home in an old street.

The street is mostly closed to traffic. Restaurants and shops keep their own hours. Plaques for Dryden, Burke and the Turk's Head tavern are on houses further east along the street.

6. Seven Dials

A star of streets laid out for rent in the 1690s, with a sundial pillar that vanished in 1773 and returned in 1989.

Look at the tall pillar in the middle of the junction, and count the streets that meet around it. There are seven. Now look at the top of the pillar. It carries sundials, facing down the streets. This layout was a speculation. In 1693 Thomas Neale, a member of Parliament and Master of the Mint, took a lease of this ground and undertook to build houses on it within two years. His lease set the ground rents by the foot of street frontage. The Seven Dials Trust explains the logic. A star of streets meeting at one point gave far more frontage, and so more rent, than the fashionable squares of the time. On 5 October 1694 the diarist John Evelyn came to look. He wrote that seven streets make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area. The pillar was carved by Edward Pierce. Antiquaries were long puzzled that its head had only six faces. The Survey of London notes that the early plan showed only six streets, and another was added. In July 1773 the pillar was taken down. The Seven Dials Trust says it was removed by the paving commissioners, to clear away people who gathered around it. The Seven Dials Trust also records a story about money hidden beneath the pillar. The stones were carted off to Addlestone, outside London, and lay neglected. In 1822 the column was set up on the green at Weybridge as a memorial to the Duchess of York, with a coronet in place of the dials. The pillar in front of you is a reconstruction. It was unveiled in 1989 by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

The pillar stands on a small traffic island. Cars and cyclists circle it, so look from the pavement and cross only at a quiet moment.

7. St Paul's Church and the Piazza

Inigo Jones's square of the 1630s, and a grand church portico that leads to a false door.

Look at the church front on the west side of the square. Plain columns hold up a deep, overhanging roof. It looks like a grand entrance, but the door behind it is false. The way into the church is at the far end. This open space was a new idea for London. In 1631 the fourth Earl of Bedford, Francis Russell, began building here, and the architect Inigo Jones designed a square on Italian lines. The Survey of London calls it the first and finest of London's long sequence of residential squares. John Evelyn believed the square at Livorno, in Italy, gave the first hint for both the church and the piazza. The church was largely finished by about 1633, but it was not consecrated until 1638. The altar was first planned for the far end. In 1636 the writer William Prynne complained that some bishops had ordered it moved to this east end. So the grand portico leads to nothing more than a false door behind the altar. A famous story says the Earl wanted a church not much better than a barn, and Jones promised him the handsomest barn in England. It was first printed by Horace Walpole in 1765, and the Survey treats it as little more than a later joke. On 9 May 1662 Samuel Pepys came here and watched an Italian puppet play inside the rails. He called it the best that ever he saw. The London Museum calls it the first record of a Punch and Judy-style show in England. On 17 September 1795 plumbers working on the bell turret left a fire unguarded during their midday break, and the church was gutted. Thomas Hardwick rebuilt it, and it is listed at Grade One.

The church and its garden are reached from the streets behind, and their opening times are set by the church.

8. Covent Garden Market Building

London's great fruit and flower market for three centuries, saved from redevelopment.

Look at the long hall in the middle of the square, with its granite columns, its colonnades and the iron and glass roofs behind. This is the Market Building. For about three hundred years this square held London's great market for fruit, vegetables and flowers. The name Covent Garden comes from a convent garden. The land belonged to the Abbey of Westminster before it passed to the Russell family, later Earls and Dukes of Bedford, in 1541 and 1552. The market began informally. The first known reference, from 1654, mentions a man living about the new market in Covent Garden. In 1670 the fifth Earl obtained a royal grant to hold a market in the piazza every day except Sundays and Christmas Day, for fruit, flowers, roots and herbs. In 1828 the sixth Duke of Bedford had the architect Charles Fowler begin this hall, and it was finished in 1830 in grey granite and yellow brick. The Duke pressed some ideas of his own on the architect, among them the balustrade above the colonnades. Iron and glass roofs were added over the open courts later in the century. Traffic congestion in the narrow streets had long been a problem for the market. Plans were drawn up to redevelop the area. Residents campaigned against the plans, and the government listed many buildings in the area. The redevelopment scheme was stopped. In 1974 the market moved to Nine Elms, south of the river. The hall reopened in 1980 as a shopping centre, and it is listed at Grade Two star.

The hall is open to walk through and has no entry fee. Shops and stalls keep their own hours.

9. Royal Opera House

The third theatre on its site after fires in 1808 and 1856, with carvings rescued from the second.

Look up at the tall portico on Bow Street. Six Corinthian columns rise above a plain ground storey. This is the Royal Opera House, and it is the third theatre to stand on this site. The first was built for the theatre manager John Rich. He signed the building agreement in June 1731, and the theatre was to be finished by the autumn of 1732. It was a playhouse long before it was an opera house. On 20 September 1808 the whole theatre was destroyed by fire. Its replacement went up in about ten months, designed by Robert Smirke. It was one of the earliest Greek Revival buildings in London. Along its front ran carved stone panels by the sculptor John Rossi, made from models by John Flaxman. They show the drama of the ancient and the modern world, with figures such as Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Menander. Behind the columns, look for a long carved stone frieze, with shorter panels at the sides. Those panels survived what came next, and they were set into the present front. In 1846 and 1847 the inside was rebuilt as an Italian opera house. Then, on 5 March 1856, the theatre burned again. The building you see was designed by Edward Middleton Barry and built in 1857 and 1858 as the Royal Italian Opera House. Beside it stands the iron and glass Floral Hall, also by Barry. The front, the foyer and the auditorium date from Barry's time. Almost everything else was rebuilt in the 1990s, including the Floral Hall, which became a public space. The building is listed at Grade One, and it is the home of the Royal Ballet and Opera.

Performances and backstage tours are ticketed and booked through the Royal Ballet and Opera. Public areas inside open on their own schedule, so check before you go in.