160: Soho Square’s Untold Stories: From Charles II to Mary Seacole

Host Hazel Baker and Westminster guide Philip Scott record in Soho Square, tracing its shift from Middlesex countryside and royal hunting ground—where “Soho!” was cried—to a late-1600s development originally called King Square for Charles II, whose weathered statue remains after being moved and later returned. They highlight residents and landmarks, including Mary Seacole’s blue plaque and her Crimean War work after being refused by Florence Nightingale’s nurses: she built the British Hotel, treated soldiers and went to battlefields, later publishing her 1857 autobiography and receiving a benefit concert. They discuss Seacole’s rediscovery from the 1980s and her statue near Parliament, the square’s 1925 mock-Tudor gardener’s hut and tunnel myth, Huguenot immigration and the French-language Protestant church, Theresa Cornelis and Casanova, and trivia about entertainer Danny La Rue, buried near Seacole. The episode ends promoting a Soho walking tour.