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The Eclectic Hall, Headquarters of Soho Radicalism

The recent demolitions and excavations in central London between New Oxford Street and St Giles High Street for the Crossrail project have opened up tiny, gloomy Denmark Place to broad daylight for the first time in three centuries. Denmark Street itself survives intact, although there is huge commercial pressure upon it to go ‘upmarket’ (dread word): its twentieth-century reincarnation as ‘Tin Pan Alley’ is now itself under threat from developers. A small meeting-house in a former chapel once stood at the back of number 18 Denmark Street, until in the 1880s it was swept away for ‘metropolitan improvement’ – the widening and rebuilding of Crown Street (today’s Charing Cross Road). The Eclectic Hall, as it was renamed in 1850, became the headquarters of a range of political bodies and additionally provided a popular platform for various other reform-minded and progressive groups and individuals. The Eclectic Hall began its secular rebirth as the headquarters of Bronterre O’Brien’s National Reform League, in 1850. Later, John De Morgan’s National Republican Brotherhood based itself there in the early 1870s; and it was also home to the Mutual Colonisation and Co-Operative Emigration Land Company, which between 1869 and 1874 assisted London working-men and their families to travel to the United States and settle in remote Nebraska and Kansas. Less formally, the Eclectic Hall hosted a range of popular entertainments, plus platform oratory from an array of independent, itinerant, non-politically aligned activists: it was truly ‘eclectic’. This article surveys the various activities at the Eclectic Hall, piecing together the scattered fragments of Soho’s political and cultural mindscape in the years between the death of Chartism and the rise of the ‘New Socialism’. Soho and Fitzrovia, just to the north, were home to a lively pub and club culture featuring political meetings, lectures and debates. Perhaps most famously, the Rose Street Club (in today’s Manette Street – just yards from the Eclectic Hall, across Crown Street / Charing Cross Road) was the headquarters of continental political refugees and a shifting assortment of their organizations; while the Bull’s Head Tavern, which stood in Crown Street, was the meeting place of the Democratic and Trades Alliance Association and was also one of the sites of the founding