Soho House

History

A house above the works

In 1766 Matthew Boulton was in his late thirties and running the most ambitious metal-goods factory in the Midlands. What he needed was a house within sight of it. On the slope above his Soho Manufactory stood a mid-18th-century house that had never been finished. Historic England’s list entry describes what happened next as “the enlargement over a long period of an unfinished mid C18 house acquired in 1766 by Matthew Boulton”. Boulton and his wife Ann moved in that year.

It was a strategic choice. From Soho House, Boulton could keep an eye on the works below, and visitors to the factory could be brought up the hill to dine. The house was where the business met the world.

Thirty years of improvement

Boulton never stopped tinkering. Samuel Wyatt was employed on the house in 1789, and James Wyatt in 1796. The list entry says the principal front, now the garden front, is “probably attributable to James Wyatt”, and a bill from James Wyatt for drawings of 1796 survives in the Library of Birmingham. The walls are faced with painted slate made to look like cut stone.

Inside, Boulton brought the factory’s ingenuity home. Birmingham Museums says Soho House was the first house in England since Roman times to have central heating, and that it also had a steam-heated bath and indoor flushing toilets. That superlative is the museum’s claim, but the point stands: this was a manufacturer’s house, built by a man who liked machines to make life easier.

Full moon over Handsworth

Soho House is best remembered for a group of friends. The Lunar Society brought together manufacturers, physicians and experimenters from across the Midlands: James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, William Withering, James Keir, Samuel Galton and others. The Library of Birmingham’s archivists record that after Dr William Small died in 1775 the group decided to meet monthly, on the Sunday nearest the full moon, dining at two o’clock and carrying on until at least eight. The moon mattered. On the dark roads around Birmingham, a full moon meant a safe ride home.

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

Priestley, writing at Birmingham in 1787, described the friends who “dined together every month, calling ourselves the lunar society, because the time of our meeting was near the full moon”. Soho House was the most regular venue. The members met in the dining room, which the museum now calls the “Lunar Room”. Here they talked chemistry, steam, medicine, canals and politics, and tried out experiments on the spot. Few dining rooms in Britain have heard so many ideas that went on to change the world outside.

After Boulton

Boulton died at Soho House on 17 August 1809, aged eighty. His son Matthew Robinson Boulton (1770–1842) took on the house, and by 1850 his grandson Matthew Piers Watt Boulton owned it and was letting it out; inventories survive from 1850–51. As Soho’s industries wound down and the land around filled with streets, the house drifted through other lives. The list entry records later names: the “Soho Hall Hotel” and the “Soho House Police Hostel”.

That it survived at all is the surprise. The Manufactory below was gone by 1863. The house above it was not.

Back to Boulton

Soho House opened as a museum in 1995, presenting the house as it was in Boulton’s time, with the Lunar Room at its heart. In 1987 Birmingham Museums had acquired the Society’s dining table, and a plaque in the Lunar Room records it. Outside, a Birmingham Civic Society blue plaque reads “Matthew Boulton 1766–1809 lived here”, and the gardens include a reconstructed “Hermitage”.

Stand in the Lunar Room and the story is easy to picture: a long afternoon, the candles lit, a jar of gas on the table, and men who were busy inventing the modern world arguing about it over dinner.

What happened here?

Boulton lived here from 1766 until his death in 1809, running his businesses from the house above the works. The Lunar Society met here more regularly than anywhere else, dining in what is now called the Lunar Room. Later the house was let, then became a hotel and a police hostel, before its restoration as a museum.