A hundred yards from where you are standing, a physician traced a cholera outbreak to one water pump and stopped it cold.
Last reviewed 12 September 2026 · A four-minute read · 1606–now
The short answer
Poland Street sits near the site of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, which killed 420 people in a ten-day span after waste from an old cesspit leaked into a public water pump. Physician John Snow traced the deaths to that single pump, and Poland Street itself once held the St James Workhouse, opened in 1725.
This shop was once a pub, a long time ago (it closed in the early-20th century, I think). Address: 22-23 D'Arblay Street (formerly Portland Street). Links: London Pubology — 2011 · Ewan Munro · CC BY-SA 2.0
Late August 1854
Deaths clustered tightly around one Soho water 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.
A hundred houses near Broad Street lost someone in ten days.
September 1854
Removing a pump handle stopped the cholera outbreak
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.
The house on this stretch of street held its own name before any of this happened.
1725 to 1762
A parish workhouse once stood on Poland Street
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.
1735 to 1744
Masons and bricklayers built D'Arblay Street by hand
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.
1820 to 1830
A nearby pit staged animal fights for crowds
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.
After 1854
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.
The granite curbstone outside the John Snow pub still marks the spot where that ground was found out.
Sourced records, high and medium confidence. Era background is marked as such.
Early modern
D'Arblay Street
Formerly Portland Street, it was renamed for the writer Frances Burney, Madame d'Arblay, and runs from Poland Street to Wardour Street just north of you.
The street was named after the King of Poland pub, honoring John III Sobieski's role defeating Ottoman forces at Vienna in 1683, and later became a refuge for Polish Protestants fleeing persecution.
The St James Workhouse opened on Poland Street in 1725, and its infirmary has been suggested as the origin behind the song 'St. James Infirmary Blues.'
The physician John Snow studied the 1854 outbreak and concluded contaminated water, not bad air, was spreading the disease, a discovery now honored by a pub named after him nearby.
Trident Studios on St Anne's Court, built in 1967, hosted the recording of the Beatles' 'Hey Jude' and part of the White Album, plus Elton John's early records.
A water pump at the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street became the source of a cholera outbreak that killed 420 people in Soho within ten days, after waste from a nearby cesspit leaked into its well.
Who was John Snow and what did he discover?
John Snow was a physician working near Broad Street who mapped cholera deaths street by street and concluded contaminated water, not bad air, was spreading the disease. His request to remove the pump handle led to a sharp drop in new cases.
What was here before the cholera outbreak, on Poland Street itself?
Poland Street held the St James Workhouse from 1725, a parish institution for Westminster's poor that included an infirmary where people such as the painter Charlotte Mercier died, in her case in 1762.
Is there a memorial to John Snow near Poland Street?
A replica pump stands near the original site with an explanatory plaque, and a pink granite curbstone marks roughly where the real pump stood, close to the wall of the John Snow pub.
What was the Westminster Pit?
The Westminster Pit was a venue roughly half a mile from Poland Street where paying crowds watched dog fights, cockfights, bear-baiting and rat-baiting, thriving between 1820 and 1830 before closing as fashions changed.
When was D'Arblay Street built?
D'Arblay Street, laid out in 1735 as Portland Street on land called Doghouse Close owned by the Dukes of Portland, had its first houses by 1737 and was fully built out by 1744.
Where this came from
1
Wikipedia — The Broad Street cholera outbreak began right where you're standing
2
Wikipedia — John Snow traced the outbreak to a single pump on this street
3
Wikipedia — A parish workhouse stood on Poland Street for over a century
4
Wikipedia — D'Arblay Street was built on the Dukes of Portland's Doghouse Close
5
Wikipedia — Poland Street took its name from a coalition victory over the Ottomans
6
Wikipedia — A Michelin-starred restaurant on this street closed after a decade
7
History Hit — Guy Fawkes was hanged, drawn and quartered a short walk from here
8
Londonist — Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded near Westminster Hall
9
Mental Floss — Cromwell's corpse was hanged and beheaded after the Restoration
10
Wikipedia — An IRA car bomb exploded on Thorney Street in 1973
11
Wikipedia — A blood-sport pit once drew crowds a half mile north
12
Wikipedia — The Beatles recorded 'Hey Jude' at a Soho studio nearby
13
Wikipedia — Marshall Street Baths opened as Westminster's public washhouse
14
Wikipedia — A Masonic pub has operated on Great Pulteney Street since at least 1756
