Golden Square
Look around you. This quiet little square, tucked just behind Regent Street, is one of Soho's best-kept secrets. Welcome to Golden Square... a place that has been silently collecting extraordinary stories for over three hundred and fifty years. But here's the thing most people don't know.
London · from the walk “Soho's Secret Side”
Golden Square, London W1F 9HS
Look around you. This quiet little square, tucked just behind Regent Street, is one of Soho's best-kept secrets. Welcome to Golden Square... a place that has been silently collecting extraordinary stories for over three hundred and fifty years.
But here's the thing most people don't know. You're standing on a mass grave. During the Great Plague of sixteen sixty-five, death carts rolled through here each night, dumping dozens of corpses into the earth. By some estimates, over four thousand plague-infected bodies were buried right beneath your feet. Locals gave this land a chilling name... "Earl Craven's pest-field." For two full generations, nobody Dared build here for fear of infection. But eventually, London's hunger for housing won out... and the plague pit was paved over into one of the city's most fashionable addresses.
The name "Golden Square" is believed to come from "Gelding Close," referring to the horse-grazing land that once stood here. But the new wealthy residents thought "Gelding Close" wasn't refined enough, so they quietly changed it to "Golden."
Now, see that weathered statue in the centre? Nobody's even sure Who it is! Confusion surrounds whether it represents King George the Second or King Charles the Second. And the story of how it got here is priceless. Legend has it the statue was accidentally won at auction when the unwitting bidder raised his hand... simply to greet a friend. The price was so absurdly low, he didn't bother contesting it — and instead gave it as a gift to the people of Golden Square!
In the middle of the eighteenth century, this tiny square became a pocket of international diplomacy. From seventeen twenty-four to seventeen eighty-eight, there was at least one foreign legation here. Even the Tsarina's envoy, Prince Cantemir, lived at number six from seventeen thirty-two to seventeen thirty-seven. And because these embassies from Catholic countries enjoyed diplomatic immunity, a Bavarian Catholic Chapel was quietly built in the gardens behind the square — on Warwick Street — right under the nose of a staunchly anti-Catholic government. That chapel was attacked by a furious mob during the Gordon Riots of seventeen eighty.
Now look down at the pavement near numbers two and three. Here you'll find the UK's First Stolperstein — a "stumbling stone." It remembers Ada van Dantzig, a young Dutch Jewish woman who came to London in the nineteen thirties to study painting restoration in a studio right here in Golden Square. Against the advice of friends, she returned to Rotterdam in nineteen thirty-nine to help her family. They tried to reach neutral Switzerland... but Ada and her parents were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered on February fourteenth, nineteen forty-three. That tiny brass square in the pavement... is one of the most quietly powerful memorials in all of London.
And those roses in the flower beds? They were a gift of goodwill from the Bulgarian capital city of Sofia, given in nineteen seventy-two. A small gesture of beauty, planted in soil that holds centuries of untold stories.