Soho has always been the kind of London neighbourhood where new ideas turn up early and tucked away on one of its most historic streets about 100 years ago, a quiet technological revolution began.
In the mid-1920s, John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor best known as one of the pioneers of television, rented rooms at 22 Frith Street where he built and tested one of the world’s first working television systems.
This wasn’t the sleek, futuristic television we imagine today. Baird’s early experiments were famously rough-edged and ingenious but the results were real. From inside that Frith Street address, Baird successfully demonstrated the transmission of moving images, laying groundwork for what would become one of the most influential inventions of the modern era.
It’s hard not to love the contrast: a world-changing technology emerging not from a grand laboratory, but from the cramped rooms of a Soho building surrounded by restaurants, clubs, and the constant buzz of London life. That mix of grit, creativity, and ambition feels very Soho.
Today, that moment in history is marked by a blue plaque on the building at 22 Frith Street, commemorating Baird’s breakthrough and reminding passers-by that this unassuming Soho address helped change the world.
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