SLUMPS, SLUMS

AND RADICAL THINKING

St Barnabus House 1 Greek St

By the late 1700s Soho was fading —

Soho Square kept its grand residents, but the surrounding houses were deteriorating, and the area grew increasingly commercial.

One bizarre venture was set up by resident John Trotter.

Moved by guilt over the grubby fortune he’d made supplying to the Army during the Napoleonic Wars, he self funded a bazaar- which invited widows of "respectability only" to sell goods from one of his buildings at a low rent. “TROTTERS BAZAAR” opened in 1816, drawing in over 2,000 shoppers a day, it continued until the 1890s with 200 sellers.

By the late nineteenth century London had become the world's largest, most prosperous city and people came flocking into Soho from all over the globe in search of what they hoped would be a new and better life for themselves and, more usually …wasn't.

Soho had always had poverty, but throughout the eighteenth century it had existed alongside a degree of affluence.

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But as this affluence faded fast (with Nash's Regent Street (1825) drawing a line between smart Mayfair and Soho) tidal waves of poor people were washed into London during the slump after the Battle of Waterloo, poverty and overcrowding increased. In the 1840’s Irish refugees arrived fleeing the Great Hunger - a famine caused by a potato blight and then compounded by .British colonial capitalism shipping out all available food and leaving Ireland to starve

Soho’s overcrowding - worsened

Soho also emerged as a hub for Italian emigres, Many worked as street entertainers, harpists or ‘Organ grinders’- barrel organs became a common sight and sound, sometimes accompanied by monkeys.

LINK HERE for insertion of Barrel organ audio

EMBED code for covent garden flower sellers

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Photo of 'London, Covent Garden Flower Sellers 1877' from Francis Frith:

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And this one

A bustling street scene at the junction of Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road.We think of advertising as a modern phenomenon. Yet the Victorian businessman was never slow nor discreet in proclaiming his sales message. These omnibuses are smothered in posters for legendary brands - Dewar’s Whisky, Schweppes, Pears Soap, and Swan Vestas.

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Photo of 'London, St Giles, Fish Stall 1877' from Francis Frith:

https://www.francisfrith.com/london/london-st-giles,-fish-stall-1877_l130215

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Charles Dickens captured the change in SOho’s fortunes- in Nicolas Nickleby - remarking on the buildings "they have been at one time tenanted by persons of better condition than their present occupants, but they are now let out by the week in floors or rooms."

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Find yourself now outside number 1 Greek Street

Amid this deprivation, charities sprung up to help. At 1 Greek st is the House of St Barnabas.

A grand building has stood here since the late 1600s; the current one was built for a Jamaican plantation owner in 1744. Since 1847 it has principally operated as a homelessness charity. describing itself as one of the few institutions in London where men, women and children of all walks of life, were able to 'apply for aid without a loss of self-respect'. Temporary guests of the house included 'all who found themselves in a condition of friendlessness and destitution that is not the manifest result of idleness or vice.'
A penny chute in the wall let passers-by give alms—one of the House's original aims being to keep families together when a husband was sent to the workhouse.

—most recently it was a not-for-profit members' club staffed by unhoused people, offering training and support to help break the cycle of homelessness.

As of 2026 it is now part of The Explorers Club of New York.

Karl Marx , the revolutionary thinker, was an impoverished resident of Soho - having fled with his family from violent suppression in the Rhineland after he and his fellow German, Friedrich Engels, had written their Communist Manifesto in 1848

The Marx family left their lodgings on Dean Street in 1855 but the deprivation here took the lives of three of their six children

A Prussian agent who came to see the family there described it as follows:

"Marx lives in one of the worst, and therefore cheapest, quarters of London. He has two rooms… Everything is broken, tattered and torn… Everything is dirty, and it is dangerous to sit down, but nothing of this embarrasses Marx or his wife in the least, and you are received in the friendliest manner, a spirited conversation making up for the domestic defects…"

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Karl Marx was just one of many political refugees who settled in Soho during the nineteenth century. In his time Soho was home to around 30,000 people.

Continue on down Greek Street..

9 Greek Street was built in 1883 as the Soho Club and Home for Working Girls. In the 1920s it became the Theatre Girls Club,and later a hostel for homeless women- open every evening of the week offering classes, a library, canteen and a low-cost medical dispensary

14 Greek Street, originally a late 17th century residence- became The St James & Soho Club in 1864 - one of the earliest London working men's clubs established to give working class men and their families a place to” meet for conversation, business, and mental improvement,free from intoxicating drinks;”

These clubs mattered, not least because ordinary people didn’t have space in their dwellings to meet.

John Hollinshead’s - Ragged London (1861) described Dwellings built for eight or ten people “are now crowded with thirty or forty, or fifty, inmates….in the wake of poverty, came homelessness and prostitution”

He relayed how Thomas de Quincy- philosopher and essayist & the most celebrated of Soho's vagrants, praised the "humanity and disinterested generosity, courage which would not falter in defence of the helpless” which he received from his "sisters in calamity," also known as the local prostitutes.

Soho's fortunes didn't improve much until the twentieth century,, but the deprivation spurred movements for workers rights and against wealth inequality and empowered workers to unionise and establish human rights.

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Now walk to 49 Greek Street

IMAGE FOLDER

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MQZQDqKsGJUL5YLmbTpU041JrqHMkHJL?usp=share_link

Mrs Cornelys House now a Catholic chapel - sketch 1850 - Westminster archives