Colin Wilson
Murder Mile
Soho: A History of London's Most Colourful Neighbourhood
By Judith Summers
Bloomsbury 240pp £14.95 order from our bookshop
I have an old map of London, dating back to 1574, on which Soho is marked as an area of open fields and woods, with a few weird looking animals - like a cross between horses, cows and geese - dotted about. It always produces a powerful nostalgia to look to the north of Oxford Street (then Tyburn Road) and find nothing but green fields intersected with streams and cart tracks. I experienced much the same kind of nostalgia as I read Judith Summers' Soho (unnecessarily subtitled 'A History of London's Most Colourful Neighbourhood') and learned, for example, that until the mid-19th century, Soho was full of barns and stables, and its most characteristic odour was of cow dung.
According to Summers, Soho began to acquire its sinister reputation in September 1683, when a strange metal coffin was found near Soho Square; through a glass panel in the lid a human corpse could be seen floating in some kind of clear liquid. All kinds of rumours of assassination flew
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger