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London Tour - Soho and Seven Dials
DIRECTIONS
Go left onto Wardour Street and first right into Broadwick Street.
At its junction with Poland Street is a replica of the Broad Street (as Broadwick Street was then known) pump, the handle of which Dr John Snow removed in 1854. The original pump is believed to have been outside what is now the John Snow pub, located on the opposite side of Broadwick Street.DIRECTIONS
Go left by the John Snow pub and along Lexington Street, lined with a sequence of Victorian and Edwardian properties.
On the upper floors bespoke tailors can be glimpsed going about their craft, whilst the atmospheric, candle-lit restaurants below give the impression of being of a bygone era.DIRECTIONS
Take the first right into Beak Street, notable for how untouched by time it appears, and the third left into Upper John Street, which leads into Golden Square.
Sadly, only a handful of houses in Golden Square, such as those at Nos 23 and 24 on the right, survive to give the impression of what it would have looked like in the 19th Century. In Nicholas Nickleby, Ralph Nickleby ‘lived in a spacious house in Golden Square’. Dickens wrote, ‘Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody’s way to or from anywhere… Its boarding houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square.’
The statue in question still stands in the garden at the centre of the square and is reputed to be of George II (1683–1760). There is an intriguing tale as to how this statue came to be at the centre of the square. It was in the process of being auctioned, so the tale goes, when an old friend of the auctioneer walked in and nodded a greeting. The price of hi unintentional purchase proved so low that the man considered it inconsequential and, having paid up, presented it as a gift to the residents of Golden Square.
DIRECTIONS
Exit the square into Lower John Street. Number 4 (the seond building on the left) was erected in about 1685 and was desined to have just one room on each floor.
Turn left along Brewer Street and take the third left into Great Pultney Street. A little way along, on the left, pause outside number 38, which was the home of:- John William Polidori (1795 - 1821). Having received his medical degree from Edinburgh University in 1815, Polidori was hired in March 1816 as personal physician to Lord Byron when the poet was forced to flee England for exile in Europe. Polidori idolised Byron and hoped that he would help him to launch his own literary career. But when the young doctor showed his work to Byron, the poet responded by cruelly mocking it, and told Polidori that he had little potential as a writer.
In the summer of 1816, during their stay at Lake Geneva, Byron conceived the idea of a ghost story competition, a challenge that gave rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Polidori wrote to stories, one of which, The Vampyre, is now acknowledged as one of the most influential pieces of Gothic literature. Polidori actually presented his vampire as a sductive, noble and erotic creature, recognisably human with pale skin and cold eyes. Once more Byron dismissed Polidori's work, and as realtions between the two men grew colder, Byron dismissed Polidori who returned to England.
On his return he found that the New Monthly Magazine had published The Vampyre but attributed it to Lord Byron. Polidori wrote to the editor asking that the eror be rectified, but found himself accused of Plagiarism. The accusation all but destroyed his literary reputation, and in 1821, he abandoned all aspirations of being a writer, and enrolled instead as a law student. On 24th August that year he took his own life by drinking Prussic acid at this house here in Great Pultney Street.
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