A pump two streets away killed 616 in 1854

Plaques on Poland Street recall poets and pop stars

You are standing on Poland Street, a few steps from a small plaque that remembers Frank Budgen — "photographer and director, popped in occasionally" — the kind of understated London joke that only makes sense once you notice how many other names crowd this same block.

Sixty-six metres off, a plaque marks where Percy Bysshe Shelley lived in 1811, one of dozens of lodging-house years the poet spent shuttling round London before Italy and drowning took him. A little further, Charles Bridgeman, the landscape gardener who helped invent the English landscape style, lived on this same stretch from 1723 to 1738.

The building block itself has old bones. Just south, the St James Workhouse opened on Poland Street in 1725 and ran into the nineteenth century; among those who died there was the painter Charlotte Mercier, in 1762. Some have linked its infirmary to the mournful American ballad "St. James Infirmary Blues". The workhouse site is now a parking garage, but the street around it — Grade II listed terraces at numbers 7, 11, 15, 24, 54 — still carries its eighteenth-century grain.

A green plaque nearby remembers Keith Moon, who performed at the site of the Marquee Club in the 1960s, and another marks where Don Arden managed the Small Faces — Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, Ian McLagan, Jimmy Winston — from 1965 to 1967. This end of Soho has always run thick with music: Trident Studios, where the Beatles cut "Hey Jude" and part of the White Album, sits 170 metres from where you stand.

A pump two streets away caused 616 cholera deaths

Two streets over, at what is now Broadwick Street, a water pump became the centre of the deadliest cholera outbreak London had seen — 616 dead in the Golden Square outbreak of 1854, traced by Dr John Snow to contaminated water rather than the "miasma" then blamed for disease. Only twelve people in the worst-hit block survived. A pub now stands nearby bearing his name, its upper floor given over to a small display of his work.

Composers and writers layer this square mile of Soho. Joseph Haydn lived in a house on Great Pulteney Street in 1791; Karl Marx lived on Dean Street between 1851 and 1856; John William Polidori, author of "The Vampyre," was born and died in a house nearby. The Ancient Order of Druids was revived in the Old King's Arms Tavern in 1781, a detail nearly as strange as it sounds.

Marshall Street Baths, a Grade II listed leisure centre built in 1850, closed for refurbishment in 1997 and reopened in 2010. Just north, Carnaby Street carried the 1960s fashion boom — Lord John opened its first store there in 1963, painted three storeys high with a psychedelic mural by 1967 — while John Stephen, who founded the street as men's fashion's world centre, is remembered on a green plaque.

A broadcasting station told Europe liberation was coming

Further out, the American Broadcasting Station in Europe began transmitting in 1944, two months before D-Day, to tell occupied Europe that liberation was coming. The Liberty department store's mock-Tudor clock, completed in 1925, still swings its figures over Kingly Street, and the Pantheon on Oxford Street, designed by James Wyatt and opened in 1772 as assembly rooms, stood until 1937 as one of London's great vanished interiors.

None of this sits on rock that announces itself. Beneath the pavement lies the Thames Group and its Eocene claystones — the clay, silt, sand and gravel laid down between 56 and 34 million years ago, the same soft geology that let London's builders dig cellars, wells, and eventually the Underground, and that once let a single contaminated pump poison a neighbourhood before anyone understood why.