The many lives of Soho Square

The first London square was Covent Garden, laid out in 1631 on a design by Inigo Jones. Next came Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1638, and Bloomsbury Square in 1661. Then, in the 1670s, work began on a new square in Soho Fields, named the King’s Square after the recently restored monarch Charles II.

These squares were built on what were then the edges of the city, allowing for large townhouses with lawns and meadows between them. But the layout of Soho Square was influenced by the French tradition of the place royale, centred on a formal garden with a fountain inspired Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Rome.

In this case, the fountain was adorned with four statues of English river gods, representing the Thames, the Severn, the Humber and the Tyne. Meanwhile, a statue of the regent by the Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber was placed in the centre of the fountain, and the water was pumped with a windmill located at nearby Rathbone Place.

By the 1690s, the ‘great square’ in Soho contained 41 houses. It was home to the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Stanford, and the 1st Earl of Fauconberg, who had married the daughter of Oliver Cromwell. It was even home to Sir Roger de Coverley, a fictional character in the new Spectator magazine, who symbolised the typical landed country gentleman.

Two of the smartest properties on the square shared the same name: Carlisle House. The one on the eastern side was occupied in turn by the second and fourth Earls of Carlisle, by an envoy of the King of Naples, and by a celebrated opera singer and courtesan named Teresa Cornelys, who hosted famous soirees and had a child with Casanova.

Meanwhile, the house on the western side of the square was home to an Italian fencing master, a Masonic lodge, an antiques furniture warehouse and – eventually – the offices of the British Board of Film Censors. But this property was demolished in the twentieth century, while the other Carlisle House was destroyed during the Blitz.

Otherwise, a remarkable number of the square’s early properties remain intact. It contains sixteen listed buildings, many dating back to the Georgian period, when owners began rebuilding and restoring the original houses. This was also the period when the name was changed to Soho Square.

Despite its fashionable first residents, Soho never became an aristocratic neighbourhood to rival Mayfair. Instead, it attracted hundreds of French exiles in London: first the Huguenots escaping anti-Protestant persecution, and later those families fleeing from the Revolution. No wonder Soho Square is still the site of the French Protestant Church in London – its current building a beautiful red-brick temple by Aston Webb, the architect responsible for the Victoria & Albert Museum.

In the Victorian Era, this address was popular with creative figures, with 11 artists living on the square in the mid-nineteenth century. Its artistic reputation continued into the twentieth century, when Soho Square was home to the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, the composer Benjamin Frankel, as well as a much-loved antiquarian bookshop. Today, the creative flame is kept alive by numerous media and music companies with offices overlooking the central gardens.

Sadly, the great fountain was demolished in 1875 and the statue of Charles II was moved to a country house north of London, where it stood on an island in the middle of a lake. That house was then bought by the dramatist W.S. Gilbert, known for the comic operas he produced with Arthur Sullivan. After Gilbert’s death, his widow bequeathed the statue back to Soho Square, where it now stands to the north of its original position.

Meanwhile, the site of the grand fountain is occupied by a tiny octagonal house. This half-timbered structure looks like a cottage from a fairy tale, or else the smarter kind of gardener’s shed. In fact, it was designed to hide an electricity substation – another of the unlikely stories hidden behind the historic facades of this unique address.