The doctor who pulled the handle off a killer

Deaths clustered around a single Soho pump

People started dying within hours of each other, all around Broad Street, now called Broadwick Street. By the end of the first three days, more than a hundred were dead. Within ten days, the toll near Broad Street and Golden Square reached 420. Whole families died in the same room. Some houses lost every person living in them.

The neighborhood was filthy even by the standards of the time. Cowsheds, slaughterhouses, and grease-boiling dens crowded the streets. Cesspools sat under cellar floors, seeping into the ground. London's sewers had not reached Soho yet. Most doctors blamed the deaths on bad air, a theory called miasma.

John Snow did not believe the air was killing people. He was a physician working nearby, and he had a different idea: the water was doing it. He went street by street, marking every death on a map. The deaths clustered tightly around one water pump, at the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street, now Lexington Street.

Removing a pump handle halted new cholera cases

Snow took his findings to the local council. He asked them to remove the handle from the Broad Street pump so nobody could draw water from it. They agreed, reluctantly, without fully believing his theory. The handle came off. New cholera cases in the area dropped sharply within days.

Snow kept digging into the cases that didn't fit his map. He found a widow living miles away in Hampstead who had died of cholera too. She used to live on Broad Street, and she liked the water so much she had it delivered by cart every day. Her niece, who visited her and drank the same water, died with her. Neither woman lived anywhere near the pump. Both had been drinking from it anyway.

The pump's water was later found to sit near an old cesspit, leaking waste into the well. Snow's theory, that cholera spread through contaminated water rather than bad air, took years to be widely accepted. It eventually reshaped how cities built their water and sewer systems.

A replica pump stands near the original site today, a hundred yards from here, with a small explanatory plaque. A pink granite curbstone marks roughly where the real one stood, close to the wall of what is now the John Snow) pub.

A parish workhouse stood where Poland Street runs

The house that number had before Broad Street even had its outbreak was the parish workhouse. St James Workhouse opened on Poland Street in 1725, built to hold Westminster's poor. It grew into an institution that outlived generations of the people it took in.

The painter Charlotte Mercier died there in 1762. She was one of many admitted to an infirmary meant to shelter the destitute and sick, not always to cure them. Some historians have linked its infirmary to the old American song "St. James Infirmary Blues," though that connection stays a guess.

The workhouse is gone now. A parking garage sits on the ground between Poland Street and Marshall Street, over what used to be its yards and wards.

Masons and bricklayers built out a Soho street fast

Before the cholera, before the workhouse fully filled, the streets themselves went up fast. What is now D'Arblay Street was laid out in 1735 as Portland Street, on land called Doghouse Close, owned by the Dukes of Portland.

The first houses appeared in 1737. By 1744, the street was built out entirely, packed with the houses of masons and bricklayers who had leased the plots to build on. A few of those original houses, at numbers 2 to 4, 10, 11, 13, 24, and 25, still stand.

Soho grew this way street by street, fast and dense, with little room between buildings and less thought for what would run beneath them.

A blood-sport pit drew paying crowds nearby

Not far off, in the same crowded Westminster streets, a different kind of crowd gathered. The Westminster Pit drew paying audiences to watch animals die for entertainment. Dogs fought dogs. Bears and badgers were baited by packs of trained dogs. Cocks fought cocks, and rats were set loose for terriers to kill by the dozen, timed for bets.

It thrived through the 1820s, in streets with no sanitation and no oversight, the same kind of ungoverned density that would let a cesspit leak into a well a few decades later. Nobody stepped in to stop the Westminster Pit's cruelty the way Snow stopped the pump. It closed on its own, as fashions changed and the crowds moved elsewhere.

A leaking cesspit, not bad air, caused the deaths

Later study of the same outbreak sharpened the numbers. The death toll came to 420 people, concentrated around Broad Street and nearby Golden Square, almost all within the same ten days.

The cause, once it was traced, was physical and specific. The well behind the pump sat close to an old cesspit. Waste had leaked through the ground and into the water people were drinking. It was not the air over Soho that had been killing people. It was the ground itself, and what generations of building on it had put into that ground.