Graffiti News

The Spirit of Soho is a mural at the junction of Carnaby Street and Broadwick Street in London. According to My London, reporting on 22 August 2026, it was installed between 1989 and 1991 and was executed by a team of artists working alongside the local community. It has stood in the same place for close to 35 years, and a large number of the people who walk past it every day have never looked up at it.

What is painted on the Spirit of Soho

At the centre of the mural is a female figure representing St Anne, named for the local parish church of St Anne's Soho. Her skirt carries a map of Soho's streets, with recognisable landmarks worked into it: the Liberty department store, Chinatown, and Ronnie Scott's Jazz Bar.

Liberty first opened in 1875 and occupies a Grade II-listed Tudor building. Ronnie Scott's opened in 1959, and Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, Prince and Amy Winehouse have all taken its stage.

Jack Chesher, who runs the social media account Living London History, recently posted a video on Instagram explaining the mural. He said it features more than 40 characters from Soho's history, among them the Romantic-age artist and poet William Blake and John Logie Baird, the inventor of television. A dog and a hare appear as well, a reference to Soho's earlier life as hunting ground, where the cry "So Ho!" was often heard.

The wall moves at the top of every hour

The feature that separates this mural from almost every other one is that part of it moves. On the hour, mechanics inside the wall kick in. In Chesher's description, Casanova blows kisses, Teresa Cornelys winks, and Karl Marx takes a sip from a can of Coca-Cola.

On the Coca-Cola detail, Chesher said the choice was "I guess to poke fun at Marx, depicting him sipping from one of the ultimate symbols of global corporate capitalism."

The figures are people who actually lived in or passed through Soho. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came to London with his family in 1764, aged eight, and stayed on Frith Street. Karl Marx lived on Dean Street with his family from 1850 to 1856. Teresa Cornelys was an 18th century opera singer, impresario and courtesan who hosted lavish and scandalous parties at Carlisle House on Soho Square, which earned her the names "Empress of Pleasure" and "Queen of Masquerades". Casanova, the author and diplomat, is described as her suspected one-time lover and the father of one of her children.

Why people miss a mural they walk past daily

Much of the response to Chesher's video came from people admitting they had never properly looked at it. One commenter said they had worked on Dean Street for four years without knowing it was there. Another said they had seen the mural but had no idea anything happened when the clock reached the hour, and would be going back.

That reaction describes the condition most public murals live in. Unlike work in a gallery, a mural is not somewhere people travel to; it becomes the background to a walk they were already taking. Thirty-five years of survival does not change that. A mural keeps its meaning only as long as somebody keeps pointing at it.

What the Spirit of Soho is useful for now

Two things about this mural are worth carrying forward. The first is that it works as a record of a neighbourhood rather than an artist's signature. It is filled with people who lived in Soho and places still standing in Soho, so anyone passing can check it against the street in front of them.

The second is the mechanism. Building movement into a wall breaks the assumption that a mural has to be a fixed image, and it pulls a specific time of day inside the work. Turning up at five to the hour is a different experience from turning up at twenty past.

Documenting the walls in a neighbourhood matters most after those walls are gone. You can see what has already been recorded near you on the Wallscape map, and add walls you photograph yourself to the feed.

Source: My London