For years, the Seven Noses of Soho were shrouded in mystery. Suddenly they were just there, nobody knew how they got there or indeed why they were there. Rumour had it, if you managed to find them all, you’d become fabulously wealthy. Then, in 2011, British artist Rick Buckley announced that he was responsible for the noses. In fact, he had attached 37 plaster of Paris noses (casts of his own nose) onto various landmarks across London. Most of them were placed under CCTV cameras as a protest against the proliferation of a ‘big brother’ society. Most of the noses – including those on the Tate Britain, The National Gallery, Hayward Gallery and St Pancras station – were gradually removed, but today seven remain in and around Soho.

Perhaps the most famous of the seven noses isn’t technically in Soho at all. The London Nose, as it’s affectionately known, is attached to Admiralty Arch and its location comes up in The Knowledge, the examination for London’s black cab drivers. Over the years there has been much speculation as to the origins of The London Nose in particular. Some said it was a tribute to the Duke of Wellington, known for his huge hooter, while others believe it was put there to mock Napoleon, fixed at a height that allowed cavalry troops to tweak it as they passed under the arch. In reality it was Buckley who had affixed that same cast of his own nose with nothing more than super glue.

Spoiler alert: the others can be found on Broadwick Street (hint, look very closely at Broadwick Soho’s building), Great Windmill Street, Meard Street, Bateman Street, Dean Street, Endell Street and D’Arblay Street – but good luck finding them.

Broadwick Soho’s seventh-floor rooftop bar, Flute, was inspired by a notable 19th-century flute maker based in Soho. William Bainbridge was an inventor and instrument maker best known for his work on flageolets or English Flutes – similar to a recorder – not to be confused with a German flute (a traditional flute). The German George Astor became one of the country’s leading flute manufacturers, and was based on Wych Street, now known as the Aldwych, just down from Covent Garden. And Clementi & Co., based close by on Tottenham Court Road, was also an important seller of flutes, despite being best known as a pianist and composer, for which he was admired by Beethoven.

More recently, Soho became the violin making centre of the British Isles, with Wardour Street its headquarters. In 1898, the violin dealers located on Wardour Street included Beare and Goodwin, Hart and Son, Edward Withers, and Georges Chanot. The latter was the youngest son of an eminent French violin maker who left Paris in the late 1850s to set up shop in Soho. He worked with Maucotel in Rupert Street until Maucotel’s retirement in 1860, at which point Chanot took over the business and eventually moved to Wardour Street (now the site of House of Minamina).

Eventually this musical heritage adapted to the era of rock and pop, with recording studios and instrument shops popping up to serve the electric age. But the roots of musical craftsmanship were embedded in Soho’s history, some hundreds of years earlier.

On the corner of Ganton Street and Marshall Street, on the side of a rather industrial, dreary-looking building, is a huge plug and socket. The building is a mini power station, an odd fixture for the centre of Soho, especially as it supplies electricity to Buckingham Palace!

Twenty years ago, the owners of the Carnaby Estate, Shaftesbury PLC, decided that corner needed livening up a little so they asked Bermondsey-based design studio James Glancy Design to work its magic. Glancy and his team know the area well. Every year, they install the festive lights on Regent Street, Carnaby Street and Seven Dials, so this was a challenge they were quick to accept.

“The idea was to come up with a design that references the power station but does so in a fun and interesting way,” says Glancy. “A lot of our design inspiration comes from a Swedish-American designer called Claes Oldenburg. He takes everyday objects – an ice cream, a shuttlecock, a trowel, for example – and makes them much bigger. So we used a bit of Claes for our inspiration and melded that with the actual use of the building.” The giant plug and socket became the company’s first attempt at ‘land art’ (it has since installed the 51 hanging light bulbs on Ganton Street and the Union Jack on Carnaby Street). Not only does it elevate an otherwise uninspiring facade, it provides an entry point to the Carnaby estate. Over the years it has undergone a number of design iterations, from green to white to blue to tropical, with two cockatiels perched on top of the socket, and a new version could yet be in the pipeline.

Engineer and inventor John Logie Baird gave the world’s first demonstration of a working television at 22 Frith Street in January 1926. He used two attic rooms in the property as his laboratory from November 1924 to February 1926. Born in Scotland, Baird studied electrical engineering in Glasgow, and in 1922 began to formulate ideas about how to transmit and receive pictures. With very limited resources, he set about investigating his theories, and by 1925 had made excellent progress. In March of that year, he began a three-week series of demonstrations of moving silhouette images at Selfridges department store on Oxford Street, using a method he called ’Seeing by Wireless’. On 2 October, working from his Frith Street laboratory, Baird managed to transmit the first television picture using the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy and then moving onto a human face. Three months later, Baird repeated his experiment, this time making a formal demonstration of his “televisor” in front of 40 members of the Royal Institution. The Frith Street attic was so small, they had to watch the demonstration in groups of just six at a time. The scientists could hardly believe what they’d witnessed. After the demonstration, Baird found one of the men crawling around under the table that was used to support the apparatus. When Baird asked him what he was looking for, the man replied that he was looking for the mirrors that Baird had hidden from view in order to carry out the demonstration.

While Baird is best known for inventing the television, he also had one or two failed inventions, including a glass razor, pneumatic shoes, and thermal undersocks. Today, 22 Frith Street is home to Bar Italia, one of London’s most famous coffee shops, and a Soho institution since 1949.

For centuries, Soho has been a melting pot of cultures so it’s likely that during your time here you’ll happen upon one or two of London’s more unusual religious buildings – often with a quirky historical backstory. The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory on Warwick Street, for example, is the only remaining 18th century Catholic embassy chapel in London. At a time in England when Catholic churches and chapels were not permitted, foreign embassies had the right to have their own chapels, and the Portuguese Ambassador, the Marques de Pombal (later an influential prime minister in his native land) had a chapel constructed at the back of his house (23-24 Golden Square). The chapel was destroyed during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 but rebuilt some years later by the Bishop of the London District, Bishop Talbot.

The Radha Krishna Temple has been the UK headquarters for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) since 1972. The temple came to prominence as a result of The Beatles’ George Harrison publicly aligning himself with Krishna consciousness after travelling to Rishikesh in 1967. In 1970, George produced the Radha Krishna Temple album, and the first single, "Hare Krishna Mantra" is said to have helped popularise the Hare Krishna movement in the West. By 1972, ISKCON had outgrown its London temple at Bury Place so Harrison helped ISKCON move into a bigger property on Soho Square.

The Church of Notre Dame de France on Leicester Place is home to an exquisite set of murals by French artist, writer, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, painted over a week in November 1959 (despite the signature which reads 1960) – the only works of their kind outside of France. When he had completed his task, he lamented that he was truly sorry to leave behind the chapel wall which, he observed, "has drawn me into another world."

Elsewhere, Soho Parish School, attached to St James’s and St Peter’s, is tucked away behind Great Windmill Street, once one of Soho’s more risqué streets. Over the past 320 years, there have been six schools in Soho, but this is the only one that remains. London’s first synagogue was established on Great Pulteney street in 1761 (although it no longer exists), and by the mid-nineteenth century a number of Jewish institutions were established in the area, including schools on Greek Street and Dean Street, amalgamating in 1853 to form the Westminster Jews' Free School at 60 Greek Street. By the 1930s more than 70 percent of the shops and businesses on Berwick Street were Jewish owned, a mix of tailors, dressmakers, cloth merchants, haberdashers, milliners, and lace makers. Most of the Jewish community has since headed to the suburbs but its presence can still be felt.

In 1763 the Mozart family embarked on a grand tour of Europe. Both Wolfgang Amadeus (7) and his sister, Maria Anna or Nannerl (11) were prodigious talents and their father Leopold felt it was his duty to proclaim them to the world. After entertaining aristocrats in Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels and Paris, the family headed to London to perform in the theatres and royal courts. During their year in the capital, they lived at a number of addresses. Firstly, at Cecil Court near Leicester Square, but perhaps most notably in a house in what was then called Fivefields Row, and which today is 180 Ebury Street in Belgravia. Here little Wolfgang Amadeus, by this time aged eight, composed his first symphony whilst his father lay ill. To accelerate Leopold’s recovery, the children were forbidden to play instruments in the house, and so, ‘in order to occupy himself’, as his sister recalled, ‘Mozart composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra, especially for trumpets and kettledrums’. It seems that the work she remembered is lost, but the symphony now referred to as Mozart's first (K.16 in E flat major) was also written during this time.

As soon as Leopold had recovered, the family moved back to Soho. They lodged at what is recorded as 15 Thrift Street, which is now 20/21 Frith Street (Frith Street was actually laid out in the late 1670s but is mistakenly marked on John Rocque’s map of London as Thrift Street). They lodged with a 'staymaker', or corset-maker, called Thomas Williamson. At this point money was getting tight so Leopold invited the public to pay to come along to hear the children play, and to test Wolfgang Amadeus by giving him ‘anything to play at sight, or any music without bass, which he would write upon the spot.'

While on ‘Thrift Street’, Mozart met the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Christian, who had an important influence on Mozart’s musical style. Still, London never really won Leopold over. Rather, he regarded England as a ‘godless, expensive, culinary wasteland,’ and rather deplored the English habit of ‘guzzling solidified fat’, by which we can only assume he meant dripping. The Mozarts left their Soho residence in July 1765 and continued on their European tour.