The Spirit of Soho Mural
Installed between 1989 and 1991, The Spirit of Soho Mural celebrates the history and working life of the area as home to tailors, restaurants, jazz bars and more.
Intended as a lasting monument to the people of Soho, the mural celebrates the history and working life of the area as the product of a wide ranging and impactful community project organised by Alternative Arts.
‘‘The Spirit of Soho gathering her skirts around people of all nations, accommodating them as they appear throughout the ages’
Gaston Berlemont, proprietor for 45 years of The French House.
Inside the spirit of soho
Discover the story behind The Spirit of Soho, exploring the mural's design, creation and the people it commemorates.
About The Spirit of Soho
It was designed and executed by Diane England and a team of artists from Free Form Arts Trust on a grand scale in the form of a polyptych altarpiece, with mosaics reminiscent of Latin American art and the murals of Mexico.
The Spirit of Soho is dominated by the statuesque figurehead of St Anne, after the parish church of Soho, St Anne’s, which was consecrated in 1686 by Bishop Henry Compton. Her flowing skirts gather a tableau of the streets between Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue.
The bottom panel collects an extraordinary range of famous and infamous faces who have called the cosmopolitan neighbourhood home: a stroll around Soho might lead you to the studio and lodgings of Venetian painter Canaletto at 41 Beak Street or William Blake’s birthplace on Broadwick Street.
Old Compton Street was where writers Rimbaud and Verlaine would meet to read poetry, and Dylan Thomas allegedly left a manuscript of Under Milk Wood in the French House. It was above Quo Vadis that Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, while Percy Bysshe Shelley lived for a time on Poland Street. Angelica Kauffman, who lived in Golden Square, was one of two women among the 36 Founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts.