When the rich and powerful moved out of Soho, they were replaced by less affluent people, amongst whom figured some of the most important artistic figures the world has ever seen, as well as innumerable writers, refugee revolutionaries, visionary thinkers and general all-round weirdos. Handel, Mozart, Liszt, the Wagner family, William Blake, Joshua Reynolds, Hazlitt, Canaletto, Mr Hyde (and Dr Jekyll), Thomas de Quincy, Constable, Turner and innumerable other lesser-known names made their homes in Soho during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were all united in one thing other than talent - poverty. Marx and his family lived in a hovel above what became Quo Vadis in Dean Street, where he wrote Das Kapital. It was only some timely inheritances coming to the family that allowed them to escape those ‘evil and frightful rooms’ to the healthier climes of Primrose Hill. Soho continued to decline, becoming by the 1860s a ‘festering sore’ to rival the East End, and rather inconveniently not so far away. It was at this time that the various hospitals and hostels that still dot the area were founded, including the House of St Barnabas, still there in Soho’s finest surviving building at 1 Greek Street (now available for private functions). Gladstone found plenty of scope for his hobby of rescuing ‘fallen women’, with literally thousands of prostitutes working the streets.
